CHAPTER IV

THE PRESIDENT The President lay asleep on his couch. Alaric as he came quietly out on to the balcony and drew up a low chair, saw that his father must not be disturbed. The sleeping man’s face, shadowed as it was, showed up haggard and unhealthy; his lower limbs, full in the sunlight, were shrunken. “He is a very sick man,” thought Alaric to himself. So he looked out and away over London, whose great buildings sent a tremor of joy into his very soul for the sheer massive beauty of them, and waited. He had not long …