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This heartened him, as a rounded phrase will do the best of us. But by-and-bye,

“Frivolity,” he groaned, “is really the cheap mask incompetence claps on when haled before a mirror.”

And at Leamington Manor he found her strolling upon the lawn. It was an ordered, lovely scene, steeped now in the tranquillity of evening. Above, the stars were losing diffidence. Below, and within arms’ reach, Mildred Claridge was treading the same planet on which he fidgeted and stuttered.

Something in his heart snapped like a fiddle-string, and he was entirely aware of this circumstance. As to her eyes, teeth, coloring, complexion, brows, height and hair, it is needless to expatiate. The most painstaking inventory of these chattels would necessarily be misleading, because the impression which they conveyed to him was that of a bewildering, but not distasteful, transfiguration of the universe, apt as a fanfare at the entrance of a queen.

But he would be Prince Fribble to the last. And so, “Wait just a moment, please,” he said, “I want to harrow up your soul and freeze your blood.”

Wherewith he suavely told her everything about Paul Vanderhoffen’s origin and the alternatives now offered him, and she listened without comment.

“Ai! ai!” young Vanderhoffen perorated; “the situation is complete. I have not the least desire to be Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg. It is too abominably tedious. But, if I do not join in with Desmarets, who has the guy-ropes of a restoration well in hand, I must inevitably be–removed, as the knave phrases it. For as long as I live, I will be an insuperable barrier between Augustus and his Sophia. Otototoi!” he wailed, with a fine tone of tragedy, “the one impossible achievement in my life has always been to convince anybody that it was mine to dispose of as I elected!”

“Oh, man proposes—-” she began, cryptically. Then he deliberated, and sulkily submitted: “But I may not even propose to abdicate. Augustus has put himself upon sworn record as an eye-witness of my hideous death. And in consequence I might keep on abdicating from now to the crack of doom, and the only course left open to him would be to treat me as an impostor.”

She replied, with emphasis, “I think your cousin is a beast!”

“Ah, but the madman is in love,” he pleaded. “You should not judge poor masculinity in such a state by any ordinary standards. Oh really, you don’t know the Princess Sophia. She is, in sober truth, the nicest person who was ever born a princess. Why, she had actually made a mock of even that handicap, for ordinarily it is as disastrous to feminine appearance as writing books. And, oh, Lord! they will be marrying her to me, if Desmarets and I win out.” Thus he forlornly ended.

“The designing minx!” Miss Claridge said, distinctly.

“Now, gracious lady, do be just a cooing pigeon and grant that when men are in love they are not any more encumbered by abstract notions about honor than if they had been womanly from birth. Come, let’s be lyrical and open-minded,” he urged; and he added, “No, either you are in love or else you are not in love. And nothing else will matter either way. You see, if men and women had been primarily designed to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for their being permitted to continue in existence,” he lucidly explained. “And to have grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom.”

“Oh, I am very wise.” A glint of laughter shone in her eyes. “I would claim to be another Pythoness if only it did not sound so snaky and wriggling. So, from my trident–or was it a Triton they used to stand on?–I announce that you and your Augustus are worrying yourselves gray-headed over an idiotically simple problem. Now, I disposed of it offhand when I said, ‘Man proposes.'”