A ten-year-old crown prince in a Central European kingdom, kept from every ordinary pleasure by protocol, slips out of the palace — while a republican conspiracy, an American girl and a chancellor with no illusions work out what the kingdom will be. Rinehart trained as a nurse and took up fiction at twenty-seven when a stock crash ruined her family; she wrote this in 1917 after reporting the war from Belgium, and the boy is not sentimentalized.