That an old man at whom everybody smiled kindly—an old man who had little else to live upon or for but love should meet a look so cold.... His underlip drooped like a snubbed child’s. Why was it? Did not the little English lady know—surely she must know!—how much, how very much old Hector Dunoisse had done, and given, sacrificed and endured and suffered, to earn the love and gratitude of women and of men? He did not wish to boast—but she might have remembered it!... A tear dropped on the wrinkled ivory hands that lay helplessly upon the rug that covered the sharp bony knees.

“You have been guilty of a piece of confoundedly bad taste, let me tell you!” said the irritated Englishman, addressing his still vibrating wife. “To cut an old man like that! It was brutal!” He added, “And idiotic into the bargain!”

“I simply couldn’t help it,” said his wife, her stiffened facial muscles relaxing into the flabbiness that heralds tears. “When I saw that horrible old creature coming, looking so dreadfully innocent and kind; and remembered how often I have seen the little French and German and Swiss children crowding round his chair listening to a story, or being lifted up to kiss him”—she gulped—“or toddling to his knee to slip their little bunches of violets into those helpless hands of his—I could not help it! I simply had to!”

“Then you simply had to commit a social blunder of a very grave kind,” pronounced her lord, assuming that air of detachment from the person addressed which creates a painful sense of isolation. “For permit me to inform you that M. Hector Dunoisse is not a person, but a Personage—whom the President of the Swiss Confederation and about half the Crowned Heads of Europe congratulate[Pg 8] upon his birthday. And who—if he had chosen to accept the crown they offered him half a lifetime back—would have been to-day the ruling Hereditary Prince of an important Bavarian State. As it is——”

[Pg 8]

“As it is, he would forgive me the hideous thing I have done,” the little lady cried, flushing indignant scarlet to the roots of her hair, “could he know that it was my own husband who deceived me.... Who humbugged me,” she gulped hysterically. “Spoofed me, as our boy Herbert would hideously say,—with a whole string of ridiculous, trumped-up stories——” She hurriedly sought for and applied her handkerchief, and the final syllable was lost in the dolorous blowing of an injured woman’s nose. Her husband entreated pusillanimously:

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t cry!—at least, here on the Promenade, 

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