asked my aunt Dorothy.

'Dear aunty, he 's a prince, and a proud man. He will never in his
lifetime consent to . . . to what you mean, without being hounded into
it. I haven't the slightest idea whether anything will force him. I know
that the princess would have too much pride to submit, even to save her
name. But it 's her name that 's in danger. Think of the scandal to a
sovereign princess! I know the signification of that now; I used to laugh
at Harry's "sovereign princess." She is one, and thorough! there is no
one like her. Don't you understand, aunty, that the intrigue, plot--I
don't choose to be nice upon terms--may be perfectly successful, and do
good to nobody. The prince may be tricked; the princess, I am sure, will
not.'

Janet's affectation of an intimate and peculiar knowledge of the princess
was a show of her character that I was accustomed to: still, it was
evident they had conversed much, and perhaps intimately. I led her to
tell me that the princess had expressed no views upon my father. 'He does
not come within her scope, Harry.' 'Scope' was one of Janet's new words,
wherewith she would now and then fall to seasoning a serviceable but
savourless outworn vocabulary of the common table. In spite of that and
other offences, rendered prominent to me by the lifting of her lip and
her frown when she had to speak of my father, I was on her side, not on
his. Her estimation of the princess was soundly based. She discerned
exactly the nature of Ottilia's entanglement, and her peril.

She and my aunt Dorothy passed the afternoon with Ottilia, while I
crossed the head of the street, looking down at the one house, where the
princess was virtually imprisoned, either by her father's express
injunction or her own discretion. And it was as well that she should not
be out. The yachting season had brought many London men to the island. I
met several who had not forgotten the newspaper-paragraph assertions and
contradictions. Lord Alton, Admiral Loftus, and others were on the pier
and in the outfitters' shops, eager for gossip, as the languid stretch of
indolence inclines men to be. The Admiral asked me for the whereabout of
Prince Ernest's territory. He too said that the prince would be free of
the Club during his residence, adding:

'Where is he?'--not a question demanding an answer. The men might have
let the princess go by, but there would have been questions urgently
demanding answers had she been seen by their