Page:MacGrath--The drums of jeopardy.djvu/54

46 be happy. The old fellow confessed that occasionally he secretly admitted a peasant maid to gaze upon the stones. But he never let the male inmates of the palace find this out. He knew them a little too intimately. A bad lot."

"And this palace?" asked Kitty.

"Not one stone on another. The proletariat rose up and destroyed it. To mobs anything beautiful is offensive. Palaces looted, banks, museums, houses. The ignorant toying with hand grenades, thinking them sceptres. All the scum in the world boiling to the top. After the Red Day comes the Red Night."

"Whatever will become of them—the little kings and princes and dukes?" After all, thought Kitty, they were human beings; they would not suffer any the less because they had been born to the purple.

"Maybe they'll go to work," said Cutty, dryly. "Sooner or later, all parasites will have to work if they want bread. And yet I've met some men among them, big in the heart and the mind, who would have made bully farmers and professors. The beautiful thing about the Anglo-Saxon education is that the whole structure is based upon fair play. In eastern and southeastern Europe few of them can play solitaire without cheating. But I would give a good deal to know what has happened to those emeralds—the drums of jeopardy. They'll probably be broken up and sold in carat weights. The whole