rred to him to make the enquiries which would have informed him that
Pollyooly, as a red Deeping, was of an older strain than the
Hohenzollerns. He made many efforts to withdraw the prince from her
society. He remonstrated both with her and with his little charge on the
extraordinary impropriety of their being acquainted. But they seemed to
find it entirely natural; and his efforts were vain. The prince, in
truth, followed Pollyooly about; and what he followed her about like was
a dog. He did not indeed spring to do her bidding, for he was not built
to spring; but it was plain that if he could have sprung he would.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about him was the improvement in his
spirits: he was losing his air of gloomy savagery; often he smiled--at a
dish which took his fancy, and on setting out for the sands to join
Pollyooly. At times, when he had performed some small feat, clumsily
indeed, but not with a quite incredible clumsiness, he would turn to her
a triumphant, but appealing, eye which begged for a word, or a smile of
approval. The humane Pollyooly rarely failed to give him that word or
smile to brace him to fresh efforts. With other little girls he had come
to be civil but uninterested; and little boys he ignored.

There are minds to whom it would have occurred that there were other
seaside resorts equally healthy with Pyechurch to one of which the young
prince might be removed to save him from the social degradation of
playing with children who were neither high, nor well-born. The baron's
was not one of these minds: he was a soldier of the emperor; he had been
instructed that his young charge was to spend a month at Pyechurch; at
Pyechurch he must spend it. But he wrote a long and earnest letter to
his august master, the Grand Duke of Lippe-Schweidnitz, informing him,
with full details, of his son's unfortunate social entanglement with a
red-haired English child, and of the impossibility, in the circumstances,
of his putting an end to it. He got no answer, for the grand duke was
splendidly busy maintaining the agrarian interests of his Fatherland.
The baron therefore found himself compelled to accept the situation
gloomily. Presently he was accepting it with resignation. He found that
Pollyooly lightened his work. She relieved him of his little charge for
the greater part of the day. He could now carry a deck-chair on to the
sands, and stretched at full length in it, with a large, but not