cause he was young, and looked at
life from a cheerful standpoint.

Cartoner sipped his coffee, and looked reflectively at his companion
over the cup. "Cartoner," Paul Deulin had once said to a common friend,
"weighs you, and naturally finds you wanting." It seemed that he was
weighing Prince Martin Bukaty now.

"I saw your father also," he said, at length. "He was kind enough to ask
me to call, which I did."

"That was kind of you. Of course we know no one in London--no one, I
mean, who speaks anything except English. That is a thing which is never
quite understood on the Continent--that if you go to London you must
speak English. If you cannot, you had better hang yourself and be done
with it, for you are practically in solitary confinement. My father does
not easily make friends--you must have been very civil to him."

"According to my lights, I was," admitted Cartoner.

Martin laughed again. It is a gay heart that can be amused at three in
the morning.

"The truth is," continued Martin, in his quick and rather heedless way,
"that we Poles are under a cloud in Europe now. We are the wounded man
by the side of the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and there is a
tendency to pass by on the other side. We are a nation with a bad want,
and it is nobody's business to satisfy it. Everybody is ready, however,
to admit that we have been confoundedly badly treated."

He tossed off his coffee as he spoke, and turned in his chair to nod
an acknowledgment to the profound bows of a gold-laced official who had
approached him, and who now tendered an envelope, with some murmured
words of politeness.

"Thank you--thank you," said Prince Martin, and slipped the envelope
within his pocket.

"It is my passport," he explained to Cartoner, lightly. "All the rest of
you will receive yours when you are in the train. Mine is the doubtful
privilege of being known here, and being a suspected character. So they
are doubly polite and doubly watchful. As for you, at Alexandrowo
you rejoice in a happy obscurity. You will pass in with the crowd, I
suppose."

"I always try to," replied Cartoner. Which was strictly true.

"You see," went on Martin, not too discreetly, considering their
environments, "we cannot forget that we were a great nation before there
was a Russian Empire or an Austrian Empire or a German Empire. We are
a landlady who has seen better days; who has let her lodgings to three
foreign gentlemen who do not pay the