Part 26

A great moon was sailing in the sky that night--just such a moon as had sailed among the torn rifts of storm clouds when the Prince at Vienna had come out upon the balcony and the boyish voice had startled him from the darkness of the garden below. The clearer light of this night's splendor drew them out on a balcony also--a broad balcony of white marble which looked like snow. The pure radiance fell upon all they saw spread before them--the lovely but half-ruined city, the great palace square with its broken statues and arches, the splendid ghost of the unroofed cathedral whose High Altar was bare to the sky.

They stood and looked at it. There was a stillness in which all the world might have ceased breathing.

"What next?" said Prince Ivor, at last speaking quietly and low. "What next, Father?"

"Great things which will come, one by one," said the King, "if we hold ourselves ready."

Prince Ivor turned his face from the lovely, white, broken city, and put his brown hand on his father's arm.

"Upon the ledge that night--" he said, "Father, you remember--?" The King was looking far away, but he bent his head:

"Yes. That will come, too," he said. "Can you repeat it?"

"Yes," said Ivor, "and so can the aide-de-camp. We've said it a hundred times. We believe it's true. 'If the descendant of the Lost Prince is brought back to rule in Samavia, he will teach his people the Law of the One, from his throne. He will teach his son, and that son will teach his son, and he will teach his. And through such as these, the whole world will learn the Order and the Law.'"

End of Project Gutenberg's The Lost Prince, by Francis Hodgson Burnett