ters smiled as with deft hands they served a
different course, or with a few wonderful touches removed all traces of
the repast, and served coffee and liqueurs upon a spotless cloth. And
amidst it all I watched with aching heart Isobel, the child of to-day,
the woman of to-morrow, as she fought her battle.

Her face seemed marble-white in the strange light, half natural, half
artificial. When she spoke at last she still kept her face turned away
from me.

"The right thing!" she murmured. "That is what I want to do. I want to
do what she would have wished. But just now it seems a little hard. I do
not want to be a princess. I do not want to be rich. Monsieur Feurgeres
has made me independent, and that is all I desire. I would like to be
free to live always my own life--free like you and Allan, who paint and
write and think, for I, too, would love so much to be an artist. But it
seems that all these things have been decided for me--by you and
Monsieur Feurgeres. No," she added quickly, "I know very well that you
are right. I am willing to do what Monsieur Feurgeres thinks that my
mother would have wished. I will go to my grandfather, and if he wishes
it I will stay with him. But there will be a condition!"

She turned at last and looked at me. The lines of her mouth had altered,
the carriage of her head, a subtle change in her tone, told their own
story. It was the Princess Isobel who spoke.

"I will not have my mother ignored or spoken of as one who forgot her
rank and station. These are all very well, but they are trifles compared
with the great things of life. I am proud of my mother's courage, I am
proud of the love which made his life, after she had gone, so beautiful.
I know that you understand me, Arnold, but I do not think that those
others will. They must bear with me, or I shall not stay."

I looked at her wonderingly. It seemed to me so strange that, under our
very eyes, the child whom I had led by the hand through Covent Garden on
that bright Spring morning should have developed in thought and mind
under our own roof, and with so little conscious instruction, into a
woman of perceptions and character. Somewhere the seed of these things
must have lain hidden. One knows so little, after all, of those whom one
knows best.

"It is a fair condition, Isobel," I said. "You are going into a world
which is hedged about with conventions and prejudices. The things which
are so clear to you and to me, they may look