That journey back to town was one of the most terrible things Maud had ever yet known in her poor little life. Dick leaned back disconsolate in one corner of the carriage, and she in the opposite one. Neither spoke a single word; neither needed to speak, for each knew without speech what the other was thinking of. Every now and again Dick would catch some fresh shade of expression coursing like a wave over Maud\'s unhappy face, and recognise in it the very idea that a moment before had been passing through his own troubled mind. It was pitiable to see them. Their whole scheme of life had suddenly and utterly broken down before them; their sense of self-respect was deeply wounded—nay, even their bare identity was all but gone, for the belief that they were in very truth descendants of the royal Plantagenets had become as it were an integral part of their personality, and woven itself intimately into all their life and thought and practice. They ceased to be themselves in ceasing to be potential princes and princesses.

For the Great Plantagenet Delusion which Edmund Plantagenet had started, and only half or a quarter believed in himself, became to his children from youth upward, and especially to Maud and Dick, a sort of family religion. It was a theory on which they based almost everything that was best and truest within them; a moral power for good, urging them always on to do credit to the great House from which they firmly and unquestioningly believed themselves to be sprung. Probably the moral impulse was there first by nature; probably, too, they inherited it, not from poor, drunken, do-nothing Edmund Plantagenet himself, through whom ostensibly they should have derived their Plantagenet character, but from that good and patient nobody, their hard-working mother. But none of these things ever occurred at all to Maud or Dick; to them it had always been a prime article of faith that noblesse oblige, and that their lives must be noble in order to come up to a preconceived Plantagenet standard of action. So the blow was a crushing one. It was as though all the ground of their being had been cut away from beneath their feet. They had fancied themselves so long the children of kings, with a moral obligation upon them to behave—well, as the children of kings are little given to behaving; and they had found out now they were mere ordinary mortals, with only the same inherent and universal reasons for right and high action as the common herd of us. It was a sad comedown—for a royal Plantagenet.

The revulsion was terrible. And Maud, who was in some ways the prouder of the two, and to whom, as to most of her sex, the extrinsic reason for holding up her head in the midst of poverty and disgrace had ever been stronger and more cogent than the intrinsic one, felt it much the more keenly. To women, the social side of things is always uppermost. They journeyed home in a constant turmoil of unrelieved wretchedness; they were not, they had never been, royal Plantagenots. Just like all the rest of the world—mere ordinary people! And they who had been sustained, under privations and shame, by the reflection that, if every man had his right, Dick would have been sitting that day on the divided throne of half these islands! Descendants, after all, of a cobbler and a dancing-master! No Black Prince at all in their lineage—no Henry, no Edward, no Richard, no Lionel! Cour-de-Lion a pale shade—Lackland himself taken away from them! And how everybody would laugh when they came to know the truth! Though that was a small matter. It was no minor thing like this, but the downfall of a faith, the ruin, of a principle, the break-up of a rule in life, that really counted!

There you have the Nemesis of every false idea, every unreal belief: when once it finally collapses, as collapse it needs must before the searching light of truth, it leaves us for awhile feeble, uncertain, rudderless. So Dick felt that afternoon; so he felt for many a weary week of reconstruction afterwards.

At last they reached home.\'Twas a terrible home-coming. As they crept up the steps, poor dispossessed souls, they heard voices within—Mrs. Plantagenet\'s, and Gillespie\'s, and the children\'s, and Mary Tudor\'s.

Dick opened the door in dead silence and entered. He was pale as a ghost. Maud walked statelily behind him, scarcely able to raise her eyes to Archie Gillespie\'s face, but still proud at heart as ever. Dick sank down into a chair, the very picture of misery. Maud dropped into another without doing more than just stretch out one cold hand to Archie. Mrs. Plantagenet surveyed them both with a motherly glance.

\'Why, Dick,\' she cried, rushing up to him, \'what\'s the matter? Has there been a railway accident?\'

Dick glanced back at her with affection half masked by dismay.

\'A railway accident!\' he exclaimed, with a groan. \'Oh, mother dear, I wish it had only been a railway accident! It was more like an earthquake. It\'s shaken Maud and me to the very foundations of our nature!\' Then he looked up at her half pityingly. She wasn\'t a Plantagenet except by marriage; she never could quite feel as they did the sanct—— And then he broke off suddenly, for he remembered with a rush that horrid, horrid truth. He blurted it out all at once: \'We are not—we never were, real royal Plantagenets!\'

\'I was afraid of that,\' Mary Tudor said simply. \'That was just why I was so anxious dear Maud should go with you.\'

Gillespie said nothing, but for the first time in public he tried to take Maud\'s hand for a moment in his. Maud drew it away quickly.

\'No, Archie,\' she said, with a sigh, making no attempt at concealment; \'I can never, never give it to you now again, for to-day I know we\'ve always been nobodies.\'

\'You\'re what you always were to me,\' Gillespie answered, in a low voice. \'It was you yourself I loved, Maud, not the imaginary honours of the Plantagenet family.\'

\'But I don\'t want to be loved so,\' Maud cried, with all the bitterness of a wounded spirit. \'I don\'t want to be loved for myself. I don\'t want anyone to love me—except as a Plantagenet.\'

Dick was ready, in the depth of his despair and the blackness of his revulsion, to tell out the whole truth, and spare them, as he thought, no circumstance of their degradation.

\'Yes, we went to Framlingham princes and princesses—and more than that,\' he said, almost proud to think whence and how far they had fallen\'; \'we return from it beggars. I looked up the whole matter thoroughly, and there\'s no room for hope left, no possibility of error. The father of Giles Plantagenet, from whom we\'re all descended, most fatally descended, was one Richard—called Plantagenet, but really Muggins, a cobbler at Framlingham; the same man, you know, Mary, that I told you about the other day. In short, we\'re just cousins of the other Plantagenets—the false Plantagenets—the Sheffield Plantagenets—the people who left the money.\'

He fired it off at them with explosive energy. Mary gave a little start.

\'But surely in that case, Dick,\' she cried, \'you must be entitled to their fortune! You told me one day it was left by will to the descendants and heirs-male of Richard Muggins, alias Plantagenet, whose second son George was the ancestor and founder of the Sheffield family.\'

\'So he was,\' Dick answered dolefully, without a light in his eye. \'But, you see, I didn\'t then know, or suspect, or even think possible—what I now find to be the truth—the horrid, hateful truth—that our ancestor, Giles Plantagenet, whom I took to be the son of Geoffrey, the descendant of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, was in reality nothing more than the eldest son of this wretched man Richard Muggins; and the elder brother of George Muggins, alias Plantagenet, who was ancestor of the Sheffield people who left the money.\'

\'But if so,\' Gillespie put in, \'then you must be the heirs of the Plantagenets who left the money, and must be entitled, as I understand, to something like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling!\'

\'Undoubtedly,\' Dick answered in a tone of settled me............