g the suite during the Jubilee of
1887--when the Grand Babylon had seven persons of Royal blood under its
roof--sent a curt message to Felix that the portrait must be removed.
Felix respectfully declined to remove it, and the Prince left for
another hotel, where he was robbed of two thousand pounds' worth of
jewellery. The Royal audience chamber of the Grand Babylon, if people
only knew it, is one of the sights of London, but it is never shown, and
if you ask the hotel servants about its wonders they will tell you
only foolish facts concerning it, as that the Turkey carpet costs fifty
pounds to clean, and that one of the great vases is cracked across the
pedestal, owing to the rough treatment accorded to it during a riotous
game of Blind Man's Buff, played one night by four young Princesses, a
Balkan King, and his aides-de-camp.

In one of the window recesses of this magnificent apartment, on a
certain afternoon in late July, stood Prince Aribert of Posen. He
was faultlessly dressed in the conventional frock-coat of English
civilization, with a gardenia in his button-hole, and the indispensable
crease down the front of the trousers. He seemed to be fairly amused,
and also to expect someone, for at frequent intervals he looked rapidly
over his shoulder in the direction of the door behind the Royal chair.
At last a little wizened, stooping old man, with a distinctly German
cast of countenance, appeared through the door, and laid some papers on
a small table by the side of the chair.

'Ah, Hans, my old friend!' said Aribert, approaching the old man. 'I
must have a little talk with you about one or two matters. How do you
find His Royal Highness?'

The old man saluted, military fashion. 'Not very well, your Highness,'
he answered. 'I've been valet to your Highness's nephew since his
majority, and I was valet to his Royal father before him, but I never
saw--' He stopped, and threw up his wrinkled hands deprecatingly.

'You never saw what?' Aribert smiled affectionately on the old fellow.
You could perceive that these two, so sharply differentiated in rank,
had been intimate in the past, and would be intimate again.

'Do you know, my Prince,' said the old man, 'that we are to receive the
financier, Sampson Levi--is that his name?--in the audience chamber?
Surely, if I may humbly suggest, the library would have been good enough
for a financier?'

'One would have thought so,' agreed Prince Aribert, 'but perhaps your
mast