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Mrs. Tait looked doubtful. Poppy Peaks she knew, and Hollywood was her oyster, but neither she nor T. Benescoten nor Terry had ever tackled the dread unknown lands beyond the Atlantic. But she brightened and looked resolute as Wiggins cunningly added:

“And this will give you a chance, if you rig it right and the two kids hit it off together, to get chummy with Queen Sidonie, Bessie, and maybe you can get her to come to the Peaks as your guest, and then, believe me, you’ll make Garbo and Kate Hepburn look like deuces wild, very wild!”

“That’s not a BAD idea,” mused Mrs. Tait.

In the sacred recesses of the Benescoten Tait home, in the Etruscan breakfast room, where love birds and Himalayan canaries billed and cooed and caroled in red enameled cages, and the solid-marble dining table glowed prettily with nineteen dollars’ worth of orchids, the Tait family discussed the invasion of Europe. They had just returned from Mr. Granville’s office, where they had accepted Lilac’s scenario of “His Majesty, Junior. ”

“I think,” said T. Benescoten, “that if we get held up in London very long, I’ll run over to Paris, if you don’t mind, Bessie. ”

“What do you want to do in Paris?”

“Huh? Why, I just want to see the city. You know, get acquainted with French customs. Nothing so broadening as travel. ”

“Then I guess you’re going to stay narrow. Fat chance, you going to Paris by yourself and drinking a lot of hootch and chasing around after a lot of wild women. In fact, come to think of it, Rabbit, I guess Terry and I can pull this off better if we leave you home. ”

“Mother!” Terry was imploring. “Please! I want Father to go along!”

Bessie faced her two men with her hands on her hips, her jaw out, and when she stood thus, no one who knew her opposed her, unless he was looking for death.

T. Benescoten grumbled, Terry wailed, but Bessie glared them down. Then she stalked to the telephone and ordered the immediate attendance of a dressmaker, a women’s tailor, a shoemaker, a milliner, a hairdresser, a masseuse, an osteopath, a French tutor and a Higher Thought lecturer.

“I’m going to Europe and I’m going right,” she said.

When, two weeks later, she took the train, she had fourteen new evening frocks, eight new ensembles, thirty-seven new hats, eight new pairs of snake-skin shoes, a thumb ring of opals, a gold-mounted dressing bag, and a lovely new calm manner purchased from the Higher Thought lecturer.

All the way from Poppy Peaks to New York, Terry and his smiling, his tender mother were hailed by the millions to whom Terry had become the symbol of joyous yet wistful boyhood.

Wiggins had generously let the press of each city and town through which they would pass know just when the King of Boy Comedians would arrive, and at every stop Terry was dragged, wailing, to bow and smile his famous Little Lord Fauntleroy smile at the cheering gangs.

The horror of facing the staring eyes, the horror of trying to look superhuman for the benefit of these gloating worshipers, while he felt within like a lonely and scared little boy, so grew on Terry that it was only his mother’s raging, only the fury of Mr. Abraham Hamilton Granville and the coaxing of Wiggins, that would draw Terry out of his safe drawing room to the platform.

Despite a certain apprehension about the perils of the deep, despite a slight worry as to how he would talk to King Maximilian— who was, said the papers, to arrive in London one day before the Taits were due—Terry was delighted when Wiggins and Granville had left them, when the steamer had snarled its way out to sea, and he could hide in a corner of the S. S. Megalomaniac’s royal suite.

He slept for sixteen hours, then, and even the indomitable Bessie Tait slept, while the S. S. Megalomaniac thrust out to sea, and expectant Europe awaited them as it awaited the other royal family from Slovaria.

Aside from gently persuading Terry to be the star in the ship’s concert, at which he recited “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “Gunga Din,” and gave imitations of Napoleon and a sitting hen; aside from permitting him to be photographed by every passenger aboard, and lovingly insisting that he wear a new costume every afternoon—including the polo costume, the baseball suit, the Eton suit with top hat, and the Fauntleroy black velvet with lace collar—aside from these lighter diversions, Bessie gave Terry a rest on the crossing. He must be saved to overwhelm London, Britain, and Queen Sidonie.