the younger sprigs of gentility, but, then, what concern was it of his ?
Did he not have enough to think about to keep the gardens so that his royal
master and mistress might find pleasure in the shaded walks, the well-kept
sward, and the gorgeous beds of foliage plants and blooming flowers which
he set with such wondrous precision in the formal garden ?

Further, two gold zecchins were not often come by so easily as this; and if
the dear Lord Jesus saw fit, in his infinite wisdom, to take this means of
rewarding his poor servant, it ill became such a worm as he to ignore the
divine favor. So Brus took the gold zecchins and De Vac the key, and the
little prince played happily among the flowers of his royal father's
garden, and all were satisfied; which was as it should have been.

That night, De Vac took the key to a locksmith on the far side of London;
one who could not possibly know him or recognize the key as belonging to
the palace. Here he had a duplicate made, waiting impatiently while the
old man fashioned it with the crude instruments of his time.

From this little shop, De Vac threaded his way through the dirty lanes and
alleys of ancient London, lighted at far intervals by an occasional smoky
lantern, until he came to a squalid tenement but a short distance from the
palace.

A narrow alley ran past the building, ending abruptly at the bank of the
Thames in a moldering wooden dock, beneath which the inky waters of the
river rose and fell, lapping the decaying piles and surging far beneath the
dock to the remote fastnesses inhabited by the great fierce dock rats and
their fiercer human antitypes.

Several times De Vac paced the length of this black alley in search of the