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The same assistant manager who had once found Bessie her room was ushered in, bowing, timidly venturing, “A cablegram for you, Madame Tait. ”

Bessie opened the cablegram. She smiled slightly, and sniffed.

“Sebenco!” said Sidonie.

“Ma’am?”

“You’re a fool!”

“I?”

“Exactly…. Bessie, my friend, Terry and you will come to Slovaria. He will be educated by my son’s tutors. You will both become Slovarian citizens. Some day he will be a general. We will bestow on him a title. Good! In two weeks we start for Tzetokoskavar. Do you play piquet, Bessie? I am very fond of piquet. ”

“Well, that’s real nice of you, Sidonie,” yawned Bessie, “and some day Terry and I will sure be glad to come over and visit you, but now we’ve got to beat it back to California. Just had a cablegram from Abe Granville, our manager. Well, I guess everybody better go to bed. ”

In their room she showed Terry the cablegram from Granville.

CONGRATULATIONS SWELLEST PUBLICITY EVER PULLED GIVE YOU CONTRACT FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND A YEAR HUSTLE BACK START MAKING MAJESTY JUNIOR EIGHTEENTH ABE

In the Hollywood studio of the Jupiter–Triumph-Tait Film Corporation they were shooting “His Majesty, Junior,” which was to be the first realistic, intimate, low-down picture of the inside life of royalty that had ever been made.

His Majesty, Terry, sat on a throne at the end of a vast room, and before him stood a squadron of guards, saluting.

The director was outlining the opening scene to Terry. “You sit on a throne in the throne room, see? The prime minister stands beside you, see, he’s the comedy character, see, and there’s a big gang of guards in fur hats, saluting. You don’t like the way one of them acts and you say, ‘Off with his head. ’”

“Aw, thunder; kings can’t say, ‘Off with his head,’” complained Terry.

“Now, you, Terence Tait, will you kindly shut up and do what you’re told?” said Bessie. “Here we work and slave and try to educate you, and then you just go on being so iggorent!”

“Listen, will you?” demanded the director, while Terry wistfully stroked the head of a broad-backed mongrel dog. “You wear a regular king’s uniform, see—red tights and a jacket with fur—and you carry a sword. ”

And the splendid labor of making a great realistic movie went on— while seven thousand miles away a lonely small boy in a palace garden studied Latin and meditated on the day when Terry and he would both be twenty-one, when they would escape from the awful respectability of being kings and celebrities.

Out on the lot, Mr. T. Benescoten Tait was talking to an obsequious extra man. Mr. Tait was wearing a sulphur-colored topcoat and a salmon-colored tie which his wife had brought him from London.

“Yes, sir!” chanted Mr. Tait. “We wouldn’t let the newspapers have the real low-down on Terry’s chummin’ around with the King of Slovaria. You see, this-here is a democratic country, this United States, I mean, and folks might not like it if they knew that their heroes, like Terry, was just like this with royalty. But fact is, this was all bunk about him and the King bumming around in old clothes. Fact is, they was introduced in London by special request of Queen Sidonie—she’s always been crazy about Terry’s pictures. And then the two kids, they were taken up to this Sandelham Castle by King George of England—yes, sir, that’s the real fact. ”

At the same moment, on the same lot, two other extra men were discoursing, and one of them was explaining:

“Terry and the King! Say, lissen, where was you brought up? Gosh, you certainly are an easy mark! Mean to say you believe all this stuff about this Tait kid being chummy with a king? Say, that was all just publicity. I know.

“Wiggins, the press agent, told me so himself. Don’t tell anybody— I wouldn’t tell anybody but you; I don’t want this to go any further—but the fact is, Terry and this kid king never met at all.

“These pictures you see of the two of ’em together, in them dirty clothes, is all fake! Wiggins was there in London, and he got hold of a kid that looked like this king, and had him and Terry photographed together. ”

“Gee, life’s cer’nly different from what you’d expect,” said his companion.

“Ain’t it, though? You said it!”