" he answered. "To tell you the truth there is no one to ask
within a dozen miles, and you particularly asked not to be bothered
with meeting yokels."

"Quite right," the Princess answered, "only I am getting a little
bored, and if you had any yokels of the Mr. Andrew sort, with just a
little more polish, they might be entertaining. You three men are
getting deadly dull."

"Princess!" Lord Ronald declared reproachfully. "How can you say that?
You never give any one a chance to see you until the afternoon, and
then we generally start bridge. One cannot be brilliantly entertaining
while one is playing cards."

The Princess yawned.

"I never argue," she said. "I only state facts. I am getting a little
bored. Some one must be very amusing at dinner-time or I shall have a
headache."

She swept up to her room.

"I suppose we'd better go and change," Cecil remarked, leading the way
out into the hall.

Forrest, who was at the window, screwed his eyeglass in and leaned
forward. A faint smile had parted the corner of his lips, and he
beckoned to Cecil, who came over at once to his side. On the top of the
sand-dyke two figures were walking slowly side by side. Jeanne, with
the wind blowing her skirts about her small shapely figure, was looking
up all the time at the man who walked by her side, and who, against the
empty background of sea and sky, seemed of a stature almost gigantic.

"Quite an idyll!" Forrest remarked with a little sneer.

Cecil bit his lip, and turned away without a word.

CHAPTER X

"I don't think," Engleton said slowly, "that I care about playing any
more--just now."

The Princess yawned as she leaned back in her chair. Both Forrest and
De la Borne, who had left his place to turn up one of the lamps,
glanced stealthily round at the speaker.

"I am not keen about it myself," Forrest said smoothly. "After all,
though, it's only three o'clock."

Cecil's fingers shook, so that his tinkering with the lamp failed, and
the room was left almost in darkness. Forrest, glad of an excuse to
leave his place, went to the great north window and pulled up the
blind. A faint stream of grey light stole into the room. The Princess
shrieked, and covered her face with her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, Nigel," she cried, "pull that blind down! I do not
care for these Rembrandtesque effects. Tobacco ash and cards and my
complexion do not look at their best in such a crude light."

Forrest obeyed, and the r