y by the gift of a full-length photograph in
a Bond Street frame, with Anastasius written slantingly across its
legs. The Prince--and herein lay the Hickses' undoing--the Prince was
an archaeologist: an earnest anxious enquiring and scrupulous
archaeologist. Delicate health (so his suite hinted) banished him for
a part of each year from his cold and foggy principality; and in the
company of his mother, the active and enthusiastic Dowager Princess, he
wandered from one Mediterranean shore to another, now assisting at
the exhumation of Ptolemaic mummies, now at the excavation of Delphic
temples or of North African basilicas. The beginning of winter usually
brought the Prince and his mother to Rome or Nice, unless indeed they
were summoned by family duties to Berlin, Vienna or Madrid; for an
extended connection with the principal royal houses of Europe compelled
them, as the Princess Mother said, to be always burying or marrying a
cousin. At other moments they were seldom seen in the glacial atmosphere
of courts, preferring to royal palaces those of the other, and more
modern type, in one of which the Hickses were now lodged.

Yes: the Prince and his mother (they gaily avowed it) revelled in Palace
Hotels; and, being unable to afford the luxury of inhabiting them,
they liked, as often as possible, to be invited to dine there by their
friends--"or even to tea, my dear," the Princess laughingly avowed,
"for I'm so awfully fond of buttered scones; and Anastasius gives me so
little to eat in the desert."

The encounter with these ambulant Highnesses had been fatal--Lansing
now perceived it--to Mrs. Hicks's principles. She had known a great many
archaeologists, but never one as agreeable as the Prince, and above
all never one who had left a throne to camp in the desert and delve in
Libyan tombs. And it seemed to her infinitely pathetic that these two
gifted beings, who grumbled when they had to go to "marry a cousin" at
the Palace of St. James or of Madrid, and hastened back breathlessly to
the far-off point where, metaphorically speaking, pick-axe and spade had
dropped from their royal hands--that these heirs of the ages should be
unable to offer themselves the comforts of up-to-date hotel life, and
should enjoy themselves "like babies" when they were invited to the
other kind of "Palace," to feast on buttered scones and watch the tango.

She simply could not bear the thought of their privations; and neither,
after a time, c