e all go somewhere in summer," Mr. Morehouse urged. Whereupon Angela
merely shrugged her shoulders. "You who live here may want a change," she
said. "I've had plenty of changes. I'm very happy where I am, thanks."

But she did not look happy, and Kate, who loved her, realized the
alteration far more keenly than Mr. Morehouse, though even he felt vaguely
that something had gone wrong with the Princess di Sereno. Kate, who knew
well what a difference happiness could make in a woman's health and looks,
guessed that the loss of her mistress's colour and spirits was connected
with the disappearance of Hilliard. A paragraph she had read in that
exciting number of the _Illustrated London News_ had, together with some
vague hints unconsciously dropped by Angela and a few words of the
banker's overheard, set Kate's wits to working, and thus she arrived,
through sympathy, at something like the truth. But Mr. Morehouse's
diagnosis of the case had in it no such romantic ingredient as hopeless
love.

He alone in America (since Theo Dene was gone, and Kate merely suspected)
knew that Mrs. May was the Princess di Sereno, who had never been a wife
to Paolo di Sereno except in name. He knew that the Princess had
grievances, and that she had left her identity in the Old World in the
wish to forget the past completely. Knowing this, when a certain piece of
news came his way he felt it his disagreeable duty to pass it on to Mrs.
May. And it was the very piece of news which had set Theo Dene wondering
whether Angela "knew about the Prince."

Most California journals are apt to give local matters of interest
precedence over affairs at a distance, and so it was that (though Angela
usually glanced through a newspaper every day or two during her travels)
she had never come upon Paolo di Sereno's name except in that old copy of
the _Illustrated London News_. There she learned how well he was amusing
himself while Mrs. May saw California under Nick Hilliard's guidance. But
after that came a blank. She knew only that he and a somewhat notorious
woman were making ascents together in an aeroplane. But it remained for
Mr. Morehouse to tell her of the sensation the pair were creating in
Europe.

There was a woman--indeed, there was invariably a woman, though not always
the same--whose flaunting friendship with the Prince had fixed Angela's
resolve to turn her back on the old life. The woman had begun a career on
the very humblest plane, had become