art of their neighbours, unaccountable
appearances and disappearances, strange flittings and arrivals.
This strong-minded and active trio--Racksole, Nella, and Prince
Aribert--might have been the lawful and accustomed tenants of the house,
for any outward evidence to the contrary.

On the afternoon of the third day Prince Eugen was distinctly and
seriously worse. Nella had sat up with him the previous night and
throughout the day.

Her father had spent the morning at the hotel, and Prince Aribert had
kept watch. The two men were never absent from the house at the same
time, and one of them always did duty as sentinel at night. On this
afternoon Prince Aribert and Nella sat together in the patient's
bedroom. The doctor had just left. Theodore Racksole was downstairs
reading the New York Herald. The Prince and Nella were near the window,
which looked on to the back-garden.

It was a queer shabby little bedroom to shelter the august body of a
European personage like Prince Eugen of Posen. Curiously enough, both
Nella and her father, ardent democrats though they were, had been
somehow impressed by the royalty and importance of the fever-stricken
Prince--impressed as they had never been by Aribert. They had both felt
that here, under their care, was a species of individuality quite new to
them, and different from anything they had previously encountered.
Even the gestures and tones of his delirium had an air of abrupt yet
condescending command--an imposing mixture of suavity and haughtiness.
As for Nella, she had been first struck by the beautiful 'E' over a
crown on the sleeves of his linen, and by the signet ring on his pale,
emaciated hand. After all, these trifling outward signs are at least
as effective as others of deeper but less obtrusive significance.
The Racksoles, too, duly marked the attitude of Prince Aribert to his
nephew: it was at once paternal and reverential; it disclosed clearly
that Prince Aribert continued, in spite of everything, to regard his
nephew as his sovereign lord and master, as a being surrounded by a
natural and inevitable pomp and awe. This attitude, at the beginning,
seemed false and unreal to the Americans; it seemed to them to be
assumed; but gradually they came to perceive that they were
mistaken, and that though America might have cast out 'the monarchial
superstition', nevertheless that 'superstition' had vigorously survived
in another part of the world.

'You and Mr Racksole have