The Frances Hodgson Burnett MEGAPACK ®. Frances Hodgson Burnett

fixedness of its attention which caused him to look at it curiously for a few seconds, and Marco met his gaze squarely.

      “Look at me! Look at me!” the boy was saying to him mentally. “I have a message for you. A message!”

      The tired eyes in the pale face rested on him with a certain growing light of interest and curiosity, but the crowding people moved and the temporary break closed up, so that the two could see each other no more. Marco and The Rat were pushed backward by those taller and stronger than themselves until they were on the outskirts of the crowd.

      “Let us go to the Hofburg,” said Marco. “They will come back there, and we shall see him again even if we can’t get near.”

      To the Hofburg they made their way through the less crowded streets, and there they waited as near to the great palace as they could get. They were there when, the ceremonies at an end, the imperial carriages returned, but, though they saw their man again, they were at some distance from him and he did not see them.

      Then followed four singular days. They were singular days because they were full of tantalizing incidents. Nothing seemed easier than to hear talk of, and see the Emperor’s favorite, but nothing was more impossible than to get near to him. He seemed rather a favorite with the populace, and the common people of the shopkeeping or laboring classes were given to talking freely of him—of where he was going and what he was doing. Tonight he would be sure to be at this great house or that, at this ball or that banquet. There was no difficulty in discovering that he would be sure to go to the opera, or the theatre, or to drive to Schonbrunn with his imperial master. Marco and The Rat heard casual speech of him again and again, and from one part of the city to the other they followed and waited for him. But it was like chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. He was evidently too brilliant and important a person to be allowed to move about alone. There were always people with him who seemed absorbed in his languid cynical talk. Marco thought that he never seemed to care much for his companions, though they on their part always seemed highly entertained by what he was saying. It was noticeable that they laughed a great deal, though he himself scarcely even smiled.

      “He’s one of those chaps with the trick of saying witty things as if he didn’t see the fun in them himself,” The Rat summed him up. “Chaps like that are always cleverer than the other kind.”

      “He’s too high in favor and too rich not to be followed about,” they heard a man in a shop say one day, “but he gets tired of it. Sometimes, when he’s too bored to stand it any longer, he gives it out that he’s gone into the mountains somewhere, and all the time he’s shut up alone with his pictures in his own palace.”

      That very night The Rat came in to their attic looking pale and disappointed. He had been out to buy some food after a long and arduous day in which they had covered much ground, had seen their man three times, and each time under circumstances which made him more inaccessible than ever. They had come back to their poor quarters both tired and ravenously hungry.

      The Rat threw his purchase on to the table and himself into a chair.

      “He’s gone to Budapest,” he said. “Now how shall we find him?”

      Marco was rather pale also, and for a moment he looked paler. The day had been a hard one, and in their haste to reach places at a long distance from each other they had forgotten their need of food.

      They sat silent for a few moments because there seemed to be nothing to say. “We are too tired and hungry to be able to think well,” Marco said at last. “Let us eat our supper and then go to sleep. Until we’ve had a rest, we must ‘let go.’”

      “Yes. There’s no good in talking when you’re tired,” The Rat answered a trifle gloomily. “You don’t reason straight. We must ‘let go.’”

      Their meal was simple but they ate well and without words.

      Even when they had finished and undressed for the night, they said very little.

      “Where do our thoughts go when we are asleep?” The Rat inquired casually after he was stretched out in the darkness. “They must go somewhere. Let’s send them to find out what to do next.”

      “It’s not as still as it was on the Gaisberg. You can hear the city roaring,” said Marco drowsily from his dark corner. “We must make a ledge—for ourselves.”

      Sleep made it for them—deep, restful, healthy sleep. If they had been more resentful of their ill luck and lost labor, it would have come less easily and have been less natural. In their talks of strange things they had learned that one great secret of strength and unflagging courage is to know how to “let go”—to cease thinking over an anxiety until the right moment comes. It was their habit to “let go” for hours sometimes, and wander about looking at places and things—galleries, museums, palaces, giving themselves up with boyish pleasure and eagerness to all they saw. Marco was too intimate with the things worth seeing, and The Rat too curious and feverishly wide-awake to allow of their missing much.

      The Rat’s image of the world had grown until it seemed to know no boundaries which could hold its wealth of wonders. He wanted to go on and on and see them all.

      When Marco opened his eyes in the morning, he found The Rat lying looking at him. Then they both sat up in bed at the same time.

      “I believe we are both thinking the same thing,” Marco said.

      They frequently discovered that they were thinking the same things.

      “So do I,” answered The Rat. “It shows how tired we were that we didn’t think of it last night.”

      “Yes, we are thinking the same thing,” said Marco. “We have both remembered what we heard about his shutting himself up alone with his pictures and making people believe he had gone away.”

      “He’s in his palace now,” The Rat announced.

      “Do you feel sure of that, too?” asked Marco. “Did you wake up and feel sure of it the first thing?”

      “Yes,” answered The Rat. “As sure as if I’d heard him say it himself.”

      “So did I,” said Marco.

      “That’s what our thoughts brought back to us,” said The Rat, “when we ‘let go’ and sent them off last night.” He sat up hugging his knees and looking straight before him for some time after this, and Marco did not interrupt his meditations.

      The day was a brilliant one, and, though their attic had only one window, the sun shone in through it as they ate their breakfast. After it, they leaned on the window’s ledge and talked about the Prince’s garden. They talked about it because it was a place open to the public and they had walked round it more than once. The palace, which was not a large one, stood in the midst of it. The Prince was good-natured enough to allow quiet and well-behaved people to saunter through. It was not a fashionable promenade but a pleasant retreat for people who sometimes took their work or books and sat on the seats placed here and there among the shrubs and flowers.

      “When we were there the first time, I noticed two things,” Marco said. “There is a stone balcony which juts out from the side of the palace which looks on the Fountain Garden. That day there were chairs on it as if the Prince and his visitors sometimes sat there. Near it, there was a very large evergreen shrub and I saw that there was a hollow place inside it. If some one wanted to stay in the gardens all night to watch the windows when they were lighted and see if any one came out alone upon the balcony, he could hide himself in the hollow place and stay there until the morning.”

      “Is there room for two inside the shrub?” The Rat asked.

      “No. I must go alone,” said Marco.

      XXV

      A VOICE IN THE NIGHT

      Late that afternoon there wandered about the gardens two quiet, inconspicuous, rather poorly dressed boys. They looked at the palace, the shrubs, and the flower-beds, as strangers usually did, and they sat on the seats and talked as people were accustomed to seeing boys