so tall as she was, and Penelope's attitude
towards him was marked all the time with a certain frigidity. Yet he
spoke to her with the quiet, courteous confidence of the philosopher who
unbends to talk to a child.

"In this country," he said, "you place so high a value upon the gift of
life. Nothing moves you so greatly as the killing of one man by another,
or the death of a person whom you know."

"There is no tragedy in the world so great!" Penelope declared.

The Prince shrugged his shoulders very slightly.

"My dear Miss Morse," he said, "it is so that you think about life and
death here. Yet you call yourselves a Christian country--you have a very
beautiful faith. With us, perhaps, there is a little more philosophy and
something a little less definite in the trend of our religion. Yet we do
not dress Death in black clothes or fly from his outstretched hand. We
fear him no more that we do the night. It is a thing that comes--a thing
that must be."

He spoke so softly, and yet with so much conviction, that it seemed hard
to answer him. Penelope, however, was conscious of an almost feverish
desire either to contradict him or to prolong the conversation by some
means or other.

"Your point of view," she said, "is well enough, Prince, for those who
fall in battle, fighting for their country or for a great cause. Don't
you think, though, that the horror of death is a more real thing in
a case like this, where a man is killed in cold blood for the sake of
robbery, or perhaps revenge?"

"One cannot tell," the Prince answered thoughtfully. "The battlefields
of life are there for every one to cross. This mysterious gentleman who
seems to have met with his death so unexpectedly--he, too, may have been
the victim of a cause, knowing his dangers, facing them as a man should
face them."

The Duchess sighed.

"I am quite sure, Prince," she said, "that you are a romanticist. But,
apart from the sentimental side of it, do things like this happen in
your country?"

"Why not?" the Prince answered. "It is as I have been saying: for a
worthy cause, or a cause which he believed to be worthy, there is no
man of my country worthy of the name who would not accept death with
the same resignation that he lays his head upon the pillow and waits for
sleep."

Sir Charles raised his glass and bowed across the table.

"To our great allies!" he said, smiling.

The Prince drank his glass of water thoughtfully. He drank wine only
o