He ought to be a noble king for
whom such men and women make such sacrifices.
To witness such devotion on the part of personages to whom she
looked up with such respect and confidence, would have been in
itself more than sufficient to secure for its object the
unquestioning partisanship of Dorothy; partisan already, it raised
her prejudice to a degree of worship which greatly narrowed what she
took for one of the widest gulfs separating her from the creed of
her friends. The favourite dogma of the school-master-king, the
offspring of his pride and weakness, had found fitting soil in
Dorothy. When, in the natural growth of the confidence reposed in
her by her protectors, she came to have some idea of the immensity
of the sums spent by them on behalf of his son, had, indeed, ere the
close of another year read the king's own handwriting and signature
in acknowledgment of a debt of a quarter of a million, she took it
only as an additional sign--for additional proof there was no
room--of their ever admirable devotion to his divine right.
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