Prince Leonard early exhibited that same craving for diversion and excitement which had made the childhood of his mother so full of incident to her teachers. He could not, as she had done, request reluctant tutors to elope with him, but he made their lives burdensome by a scientific curiosity to observe their conduct under such trying circumstances as the cold aspersion of unsuspected booby-traps. Indeed, such was the continuous pressure of his animal spirits, and his greed of adventure, that the gentlemen who held these brief appointments were as precariously situated as engine-drivers the boilers of whose machines might be expected momentarily to burst. He was an excellent rider, born to the saddle, and at the age of eleven his handicap at golf was only nine. He had a fanatical abhorrence of his lessons, and his natural linguistic powers, and the royal birthright of memory, made whatever intellectual task he was good enough to undertake extremely easy to him. He had the fair skin and dark hair of his mother, and in the whole realm of RhodopÉ there was not a more lovable or so unmanageable a boy.

When he was just thirteen, he indulged in a series of escapades that made Sophia take him seriously. The first of these was that he challenged, fought with, and wrought havoc upon the pasty person of the son of the Mayor of Amandos, an act undignified in one of his station, and performed in a manner distressingly public. The two, stripped to their shirts and trousers, had fought three rounds in the square in front of the cathedral, while Sophia, with whom Leonard had been driving to a public function, paid a call of condolence on the wife of the Mayor, a victim to neuralgia. The Princess and she had been sitting in a room overlooking the square, when the hubbub from outside, and shouts of ‘Go it, Prince Leonard! Three to one on the Prince!’ caused them simultaneously to rise, and run in apprehensive haste to the window. The carriage, which had waited in the street, was tenantless, the Prince’s hat and sailor jacket were lying in the road, a crowd of street-boys made an enthusiastic ring, and the heir-apparent to the throne had his opponent’s head comfortably in chancery. The wife of the Mayor gazed but for one moment, and then shrieking out, ‘The monster! he will kill my child!’ rushed distractedly from the room. Sophia followed, and on the stairs ran into the boy’s tutor, who, being totally unable to stop him fighting, had very sensibly hastened to tell his mother. The Mayoress bore her battered offspring away, and Sophia returned to the carriage with Leonard.

‘Oh, mother, didn’t I give it him!’ cried the boy. ‘My knuckles are quite sore with hitting his great head. He couldn’t have lasted another round.’

‘Put on your jacket at once, Leonard,’ said his mother sternly. ‘You, the Prince, fighting in the public street! I wonder you are not ashamed!’

‘But I couldn’t help it,’ cried Leonard. ‘I had to fight him. He said things about you.’

‘Don’t talk so loud, Leonard,’ said Sophia. ‘Tell me what he said.’

‘He said that you were the most notor—notorious—he always uses words a yard long—the most notorious gambler in RhodopÉ; so, of course, I said he lied, and would he fight or take a licking? Indeed, he did both.’

His mother flushed with pleasure, but she sighed at the end.

‘I’m afraid he was near the mark, Lennie,’ she said.

‘But what is notorious?’ asked Leonard, ‘I didn’t know what he meant, but, anyhow, it was calling you names.’

‘It means the most regular,’ said Sophia.

Leonard considered a moment with his head on one side.

‘That doesn’t sound very bad,’ he said; ‘but, anyhow, he had no business to say so. No. I’m glad I fought him. Lord, how sore he will be!’

He smoothed his ruffled hair, and put his hat on.

‘I suppose it is true that you are at the club pretty often?’ he continued. ‘Mother, will you take me there sometimes? I have never been.’

Sophia felt suddenly serious and responsible.

‘No; never,’ she said with energy. ‘Promise me you will never go. I certainly shall not take you there; it is no place for you.’

‘Then, some day I shall go without you,’ remarked Leonard.

Sophia was so anxious that he should not—why, it perhaps would have puzzled her to say, except that she vaguely pictured his fresh young face looking singularly out of place in that gas-lit assembly—that she did her best to persuade him to promise that he would never set foot in the club, but unavailingly. The more she urged, the more Leonard’s desire to go increased.

‘And,’ as he remarked with candour, ‘I shan’t make a promise, because then I should feel obliged to keep it.’

So at last she desisted, feeling she would have been wiser not to have urged, and hoping that the boy would forget about it; for she would sooner he fought the Mayor’s son than cut his gambling teeth, and, indeed, the history of their quarrel had warmed her heart.

Two evenings afterwards she was sitting at her usual place on the right of Pierre, playing roulette. She was enjoying a rare run of luck, and her stakes were recklessly high. She had just placed the limit on a single number, when, looking up, she saw opposite her a young girl seated at the table watching the game with flushed and wide-eyed interest. She turned to Blanche Amesbury, who was sitting next her.

‘Look at that pretty child opposite,’ she said. ‘But what a way to dress a girl! She must be the daughter of that English brewer peer. What refined types you meet among the bourgeois! How its dear little heart is in the game! Yet it seems almost a shame to bring it here—this is no place for children—but the nouveaux riches are always horrible. Why—— Oh, good gracious me! it’s Leonard.’

Leonard caught the sound of his name, and looked up for a fraction of a second.

‘Oh, a moment—a moment!’ he cried. ‘Fourteen, fifteen—— Hurrah! sixteen wins. Good old sixteen! I wish I had staked on a single number instead of the half-dozen.’

He had been so absorbed in the game that for a moment he did not notice his self-betrayal, nor the shout of laughter which followed; but now he stood there in all the conscious shame of his girl’s dress. He blushed up to the roots of his hair, and pushed his way confusedly out of the room, forgetting even to take with him what he had won on the last roll.

Sophia tried to look grave and unconscious, but in a few seconds the corners of her mouth broke down, and she leaned back in her chair with peal after peal of laughter.

‘Oh, I could never have invented so divinely apt a punishment!’ she cried. ‘Leonard detected in a girl’s dress, and before all the people! Indeed, that is an instance of the fierce light that beats upon a throne. Oh, how furious he will be! I wonder where he got his costume. His hat—oh, my dear Blanche! his hat! It was like Covent Garden on a summer’s morning—a cargo of flowers and nameless vegetables. Oh, I cannot stop; I must go and rub the lesson in. He has a horror of making himself ridiculous. Perhaps this will cure him for awhile.’

Sophia went straight back to the Palace, where the servants were all agape to see her return so early, and to Leonard’s room. He had got there only a moment before her, since she had taken the short-cut through the private door in the Palace garden, and he was tearing the detected finery from him. On his bed lay the hat, a perfect garden of magenta roses and sage-green ribbons, and he was even then wrestling with the hooks and eyes of the bodice. The boy stamped his foot angrily when he saw her, and his cheeks were redder than the roses in his hat and infinitely more healthy in tone.

‘Why did you make a fool of me, mother,’ he cried, ‘before all those people? I shall never be able to go to the Casino again. It was brutal of you, and I was enjoying myself so much.’

Sophia burst out laughing.

‘Dear Lennie, what a lovely hat!’ she cried. ‘Where did you get it? I shall order one like it, and we will go driving together in them. Do you propose to wear that dress always instead of your sailor clothes? It is not very well cut. As for my making a fool of you, I think you are more to blame than I. How could you do such a thing!’

‘It was your fault,’ cried he. ‘I had forgotten everything in the game. Oh, these strings! I think the devil made them.’

‘And a fool tied them,’ said Sophia. ‘Here, let me do them for you. I thought the dress did not fit very well, and no wonder, if you had your shirt on under the bodice and your trousers under the skirt. And where are your stays? It is all your fault, Leonard; I told you not to go to the club.’

‘I hope you didn’t think I was going to obey you?’ said Leonard, with singular contempt.

‘Anyhow, you thought fit to disobey me—oh, don’t wriggle so!—and you have been very properly paid out for it. You are too young to gamble. My poor boy! every shopkeeper in RhodopÉ is laughing at you this moment, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. For me, I have never been so nearly hysterical; I was helpless with laughter. I told you you were too young to gamble, and you would not take my word for it. You have been very naughty and disobedient, and you made a thorough exhibition of yourself—within three days to fight in the streets and to dress up as Polly to go to the Casino. Oh, that hat! What a creation!’ and she began to laugh again. ‘I thought you were one of the bourgeois.’

Leonard stepped out of the skirt, and pulled down his trousers, which he had rolled up to the knees over his sturdy calves, and regarded his mother critically.

‘I say, mother, you know you must have begun pretty young, too,’ he said. ‘The earliest thing I can remember is being told you were the finest gambler in Europe. I watched you playing to-night. You played very quietly, and by your face a man could not tell whether you had won or lost. Is that the chic way to gamble?’

‘That is the only way to gamble,’ said she, forgetting for a moment the moral lesson. ‘I have seen men and women tremble so that they could scarcely pick up their winnings. Whatever you do, always keep quiet at the tables. There is no such test of decent breeding.’

‘You must teach me,’ said Leonard insidiously. ‘We might play for—for counters at first, quietly, at home.’

‘That would be very amusing,’ remarked his mother, ‘and roulette for two would certainly be a novelty; but I don’t want you to grow up a gambler, Leonard.’

‘Yet to-night I found it very entertaining; and did not you grow up a gambler?’ said he. ‘Also, it seemed to me easy, which is an advantage.’

‘Easy! There is no such word. There is good luck and bad luck; that is all the vocabulary.’

‘When did you first begin playing?’ asked he.

‘When I was too young.’

‘Then, I expect that was a very long time ago,’ said the boy; ‘for I do not see how you can begin too early;’ and with this the conversation closed. Sophia, as may have been detected, could never have been predestined to attain to eminence as a disciplinarian, and Leonard’s tutors, like her own, proved about equally inefficient in managing him. One after another were surveyed by the boy, and judged wanting. One could not ride, another could not shoot, a third wore spectacles, and topped his drives with unique regularity; but one and all joined hands in this, that they were totally unable to make him learn except when he chose to learn, or to exercise the slightest discipline over him out of lesson hours, and very little in.

Sophia soon grew considerably exercised about the boy. She had begun to see that the atmosphere of the Palace of Amandos was not entirely wholesome. He was not disciplined in any way, which she considered the worst preparation for a lad who would one day be an autocratic Sovereign. She compared the escapades of her own youth with his, and had to confess that she, at any rate, had been a little in awe of her father. She had often revolted, but with an uneasy feeling that consequences might follow, and thus disobedience had its drawbacks. Leonard, on the other hand, disobeyed her whistling, with his tongue in his cheek, and to him disobedience never seemed to bring with it any drawbacks at all. By the time she saw him next she would have forgotten about the incident, or if she remembered it, and began a little homily, Leonard would shut his eyes, turn down the corners of his mouth, and, with an air inexpressibly comic, say, ‘Let us pray.’ Once she had instructed Mr. Lanthony, the tutor with the spectacles, not without much inward misgiving, to use the cane to Leonard next time punishment was necessary, and, such an occasion occurring within an hour of the edict, Leonard had thrown a copy of Magnall’s Questions at Mr. Lanthony’s face when he produced the cane with so much precision that his spectacles were dashed into a thousand fragments, and his eyes gushed out with involuntary water. His mother had not told the boy that the proposed caning was consonant to her orders, and Leonard came to her in much indignation.

‘Mother,’ he cried, ‘you couldn’t guess what has happened if you tried a hundred times: that old giglamps said he would cane me this morning—me!’ and he tapped his waistcoat.

‘I am convinced you deserved it,’ said his mother calmly.

‘And I am convinced that his spectacles will never be fit to see through again,’ retorted Leonard, angry at finding her so unsympathetic.

‘Leonard, what have you done?’ she said.

‘I threw Magnall’s Questions at him hard,’ he said; ‘and thus his spectacles are not worth anything now.’

‘You wicked boy!’ cried his mother. ‘It was I who told Mr. Lanthony to cane you. You are very naughty and mischievous, and you must go and beg Mr. Lanthony’s pardon, and take your caning like a man; and your pocket-money shall be stopped to pay for his spectacles.’

Down went the corners of Leonard’s mouth.

‘Oh, dear!’ he sighed; ‘let us pray; but get it over quick.’

In effect Mr. Lanthony had to do without the apology, and Prince Leonard without his caning; but the tutor had an interview with Sophia, and, after tendering his resignation, ventured to offer a word of advice.

‘I should lose no time in sending him to Eton,’ he said.

‘Who is Eton?’ asked his mother.

Mr. Lanthony was frankly horrified.

‘Eton is a school, your Royal Highness,’ he replied; ‘in fact, it is the school. It seems strange to an Englishman to find even in RhodopÉ that Eton is unknown; but “Non cuivis attingit adire Corinthum.”’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Sophia politely.

‘I merely said Eton was a school,’ said Mr. Lanthony.

‘I think I have heard of it, now I consider,’ said Sophia. ‘It is near Windsor, is it not? What does one do? Shall I take a house for him, or will he live in London, and go down for an hour or two every day?’

‘That will not be necessary,’ replied Mr. Lanthony. ‘The house, on the other hand, will take him;’ and he sketched to the Princess the main features of a public school.

‘Yes, it sounds nice,’ she said vaguely; ‘but he is, as you know, so high-spirited. Will they try to cane him there? I tremble to think what will happen—dear me! your eye is bad, Mr. Lanthony—if the headmaster tries to cane him.’

Mr. Lanthony gave the ghost of a smile. His mouth was untouched by Magnall’s Questions.

‘I don’t think you need consider that, your Royal Highness,’ he said—‘at least, you need not be uneasy for the headmaster; nor, indeed, for the Prince—the birch is quite harmless.’

‘The birch!’ cried Sophia. ‘How terrible it sounds!’

‘It is of no consequence,’ said Mr. Lanthony gravely; and the pain of Magnall’s Questions grew sensibly less.

‘Well, we must ask Leonard,’ said his mother. ‘Supposing he refuses to go? What are we to do then? I don’t think either of us has much influence with him, you know.’

But Leonard, when appealed to, was considerably taken with the idea; there would be a lot of boys to play with, and he wanted to go to England.

‘I expect it’s more fun with heaps of other boys than with one old muff at a time,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ll be an Eton boy.’

When Sophia had made up her mind to a thing, she was not slow to put it into execution. She wrote an exceedingly kind and condescending letter to the headmaster, giving him to understand that she was prepared to confer this priceless boon on Eton at Mr. Lanthony’s recommendation; but that gentleman, to whom she read it, advised another tone. The headmaster was radically-minded, and would not be likely to be dazzled at the prospect; she could put it more simply. Indeed, perhaps it would be better if he wrote himself to a housemaster he knew there, asking if he could by any means secure a vacancy in his house for a boy aged fourteen, or if he knew of anyone else who had a vacancy. All this sounded terribly democratic to the Princess; but, having failed so signally herself with Leonard, she was desirous that other more practised hands should take the reins from her, and she would, so she expressed herself with a little acidity, go down on her knees before all the masters in Christendom if this were the more proper attitude to take.

It was finally arranged that Leonard should enter the school in April, and Sophia threw herself with zest into the scheme. She conferred on his housemaster the Second Order of the Bronze Cross, and sent him the key to a private cipher, by means of which he could daily communicate with her. She asked whether £1,000 pocket-money a term would be sufficient to supply her boy with school requisites, and whether she should open an account for him at the Eton and Windsor Bank. She hoped they would all remember—perhaps he would be so good as to speak to his colleagues about it—how exceedingly high-spirited the Prince was, and how little discipline he had yet received. Finally, she drove the unfortunate man to the verge of imbecility by saying that she hoped they allowed no roulette at all in the school, and only vingt-et-un at moderate points. Mr. Lanthony had already left for England before this unhappy series of letters was despatched, or some of them might have been averted.

Leonard left for England at the end of March, and it was in a way an immense relief to his mother when he had gone, for she felt strangely responsible for his education. She had made up her mind that he was to be a good ruler, and she saw clearly that RhodopÉ was no place for him yet. Her own popularity had redeemed, so far, her reign from failure, but she was candid enough to allow that she might have let her sphere border more nearly on usefulness. Prince Petros’s mad attempt had been an unexampled piece of luck; it had given her an Éclat she could scarcely have won otherwise, so also had her institution of the club. She had founded it to supply amusement to herself; she found that she had given occupation to her people. But already she foresaw that in the course of years the morals of the people would deteriorate, the hardy mountain folk would become people of the asphalt, of the gaslight. As long as the club continued to act as a star for the enjoyment of health-questing moths, so long, no doubt, would the Budget of RhodopÉ be a pattern to other more puritanically constituted States; but the surplus on the Budget would be paid for in other ways. She saw the sheep of RhodopÉ without their shepherds; she saw the vineyards without their vine-diggers; she dimly forecast the army destitute of privates, and peopled only with honorary colonels. She had the grace to shudder at the logical outcome of the era she had instituted, only she could not in her own person break the chain of circumstance on which it hung. Amandos without the club! She starved at the thought. It had been bad enough before; now, when the days there had actually ceased to be tedious, owing to the diversions supplied by her roulette, with what a cold shuddering of the spirit she saw herself shorn of that which made life tolerable! But that chain of circumstances should be broken by her son. She had endowed him with the gambling blood, but that was inevitable; at least she was now making an effort whereby the hereditary instinct should not come to fruition. She had sent him to England, that home of three-penny points; she had expressed herself most clearly to his housemaster at Eton on the question of roulette. She could not have done more, and her conscience approved her.

Meantime, throughout the length and breadth of Europe her reputation had gone abroad. Her great coup, now eleven years ago, which had steadied the tottering House of Ægina, had taken hold on the popular imagination, and the boldness and dash of the move had raised up in real hosts those unknown admirers which so many of those who act in public secretly and mistakenly suppose are theirs. That return from Corfu, triumphant over a riotous and wrecking sea, the cross-country sledge journey, the arrival in the nick of time, the hopeless and utter defeat of her husband and the acuter Malakopf, her rapturous welcome by the people, were all things to enkindle the blood in an age in which diplomatic papers are sufficient to set the world blazing. She was a picturesque figure, and an unpicturesque epoch has always this saving grace, that it delights in picturesque figures when they do appear. However much we may live environed by gray and green, a vivider tint is ever applauded. Again, she was admirably posed. To the eye of Europe she went stake in hand from the roulette-board to the rescue of her House, and having saved her House, went back to where the ball was still rolling and won. She had dash and brilliance and beauty, she was neither prude nor puritan. Indeed, she seemed one of those to whom success comes as if by birthright.

But with the instinct of a true gambler, she called her own success a run of luck. Sooner or later, unless her line staked on another colour, it would go against them, and her resolution to reform took the shape of reforming, or rather putting on the other colour, her son, Prince Leonard. She was determined, at the sacrifice of her natural desire, to see him but seldom; he should be a stranger to the tables of RhodopÉ and the Riviera; he should play cricket and polo and hockey—whatever that was—instead of bezique and baccarat. She was herself so warm an admirer of the open air, that she felt she was not starving him. Had she not been a Princess, she would have chosen to be a man and a dweller in the mountains. Horses and dogs, a keen eye, and an obedient hand, were admirable things, and good enough for anybody.

For the next few years Leonard did not set foot in RhodopÉ at all, and he saw his mother occasionally only, in her short and scarce visits to England. At Eton the high spirit which his mother had feared would be a source of possible danger to the head had shown itself reasonable, and in the course of one painful interview between the two, of which the cause was tobacco, and the end the birch, no books had been thrown. He did the minimum of work required with cheerfulness, if not zest, and, far more important, he was immensely popular with his fellows. He grew tall and strong on the banks of the Thames. At the age of sixteen he got into the eleven, and in the match against Harrow cracked the enamelled face of the clock at Lord’s off a half-volley just outside his leg-stump. He also indulged in various other amusements, which as yet had not come to light, but which appeared in damning concourse very shortly indeed before he left.

One morning in July he went into his room after twelve to change for cricket. On the table were two letters—one from his mother, who told him that she was on her way to England, and would arrive at the end of the month. She would stay a few days in London, and if Eton had broken up he had better come to her there. It was long since she had been in London, and they would see the sights together, from the Westminster Aquarium to the Tower of London, and from Madame Tussaud’s even to the Zoological Gardens and the Adelphi Theatre. There was no harm, she said, in a little gaiety, and she did not wish to cut Leonard off from all amusements. The other letter was from a groom of some training stables, and it interested him far more, for it gave the best possible account of Muley Moloch, a horse which Leonard was backing heavily for the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown. Accordingly at the end of the half Leonard went up to London to join his mother. She had taken a great suite of rooms at the HÔtel MÉtropole, with a private entrance, where she lived under her usual incognito of the Countess of Ægina.

Leonard arrived late in the evening, and found her with a few friends playing baccarat. His mother threw down her cards when he entered.

‘Dearest Leonard!’ she cried; ‘but I should scarcely have known you. How you have grown, and how you have improved! I am so delighted to see you again! Have you dined?’

Indeed, any mother might have been proud of him. He had grown up tall, well-looking, and with an extraordinary frankness and charm of manner. Though he was still but seventeen, he looked almost a man, and Princess Sophia felt how wise she had been to send him to school.

‘I have dined,’ he said, after being introduced to his mother’s guests. ‘And if you will let me, mother, I will join you in your game. Baccarat, is it not? A good game.’

‘Oh, Leonard, what business have you to know that!’ cried his mother. ‘I particularly asked that no baccarat should be allowed at Eton.’

Leonard laughed.

‘It is strictly prohibited,’ he said; ‘every boy at Eton will tell you so. Do not blame the masters. Will you lend me some money, mother?’

Though the Princess would have preferred that he should not play at all, she had the consolation of that he played well. His face was a mask of good breeding, not an eyelash betrayed emotion, and he looked gravely amused whether he won or lost.

‘He is a born gambler. It is in the blood, you know,’ she said under her breath to her cousin, the Duchess of Winchester, who was sitting next to her, and the Duchess thought she detected pride and not regret alone in her voice.

Mother and son, as arranged, went out the next days to see the sights of London. To the Princess it seemed to have grown sadder and foggier since she had seen it last. Their expeditions were mostly made on foot, for the Princess loved the bustle and stir of the streets, and more than once they made the top of an omnibus their observatory.

‘There are plenty of people, certainly,’ she said one day to Leonard, as they swayed and rolled up Baker Street; ‘and I love crowds. But observe their infinite sadness of demeanour. What a load of responsibility seems to rest on the least and meanest shoulders! Look at that baker there! If he was in RhodopÉ I would make him Court undertaker. To what genuine melancholy is he the prey! If I was responsible for the whole creation, I should not be so sad. And they all walk so fast, as if they were going to catch the dying words of a near and dear relative, and would only just get there in time. After all, I am glad I am a Southerner. We may not be so good, but we are certainly gayer. And it is certainly good to be gay.’

They stopped at the corner where Madame Tussaud’s red exhibition stood, and Leonard, who for some minutes had been with difficulty restraining his laughter, suddenly burst out into a great shout of amusement.

‘England, at any rate, has not made you sad at present,’ said the Princess. ‘What is the matter, Leonard?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said the lad; ‘at least, you will soon know.’

She paid their entrance-money—Leonard tossed his mother who should pay for both, and won—and began the tour of the room. Suddenly the Princess gave a little exclamation of horrified surprise, and rapidly turned up No. 27 in the catalogue. What met her indignant eye was this:

‘The gambling Princess Sophia.—Princess Sophia of RhodopÉ, though only just forty, is surely the most rankly notorious crowned head of Europe. She spends the greater part of every day in the club she has started at the capital, Amandos, and the era of gambling she has introduced is rapidly undermining the physique and morale of her little kingdom. She has confined her old Prime Minister, Malakopf, a financier of European reputation, to a life-long imprisonment for some imaginary plot against the throne; and her husband, Prince Petros of Herzegovina, she has divorced and banished from the principality of RhodopÉ. He is described by those who knew him as a man of charming manner and quick insight. The Princess has a violent temper and is growing very stout. Her only son, Prince Leonard, is at school at Eton.’

The room was almost empty, and Leonard put no bounds to his amusement. He stamped and choked, his mouth was full of laughter.

‘Oh, oh!’ he cried, ‘it is too funny! And, mother, I hear they are thinking of sending you to the Chamber of Horrors. I stayed in London last long leave and saw it. Oh, oh, the Chamber of Horrors, with murderers and Phoenix Park tragedians and people who have their throats cut in their baths. Oh, I shall burst!’

Sophia turned icily from him, read the description of herself through again in the catalogue, and then examined the figure. It was seated in the most realistic pose in front of a small green-cloth table. One hand held three or four playing-cards, the other was clutched on a heap of counterfeit coins. It represented her in full evening dress, with the Order of the Silver Cross and the Salamander on her shoulder, both faultlessly executed. Her dress was of white brocade, and it might have been copied by Worth himself, so she thought, from the gown which she had worn on the night of her memorable and unexpected home-coming. The pasty, formless fingers glittered with immense glass jewels; she wore a tiara of diamonds, and a copy in some cheap and tawdry material of the RhodopÉ pearls.

But it was the presentment of the face that most appalled the Princess. The likeness was unmistakable, yet it was the most prodigious parody. She herself was pleasantly furnished with flesh, the waxwork bulged with fatness. Her own black eyes, with their long lashes, became wicked lakes of darkness, her fine-lipped mouth was moulded into evil and monstrous curves. Avarice sat enthroned in her greedy expression and in the clutching hand.

The Princess examined it with scrupulous care, then turned with a petrified face to Leonard, who was wiping his eyes. Every now and then a fresh gust of laughter shook him, and he held his aching ribs for fear they should burst. Sophia watched him a moment with malignity; it seemed yet doubtful whether she would run her parasol through the face of the waxwork, or box his ears; but by degrees the infection of his merriment caught her, and sitting down by him on a crimson-covered ottoman, she gave way to peal after peal of laughter. He had been on the verge of recovery, but they mutually infected one another, and in a few moments were equally lost to all power of speech, and could only point feebly and shakingly, as they shook and rolled on the sofa, at the greedy and clutching figure of the waxwork. A few more people had come into the gallery, and were attracted by this convulsed couple, but, with the supercilious contempt with which the English regard merriment in which they do not share, passed them by. Close at hand, however, sat the figure of the gambling Princess, and one by one they glanced back furtively to the real one on the crimson ottoman. There could be no mistaking, even in the convulsions of her laughter, the prototype of the figure.

Soon Princess Sophia observed this, and with a sudden accession of dignity hurried Leonard off.

‘Let me show you the way to the Chamber of Horrors,’ he said, in a voice vibrating with suppressed laughter, ‘so that you will know where to look for yourself next year.’

They could give but a superficial attention to that temple of classical criminals. Sophia longed to go back to her own figure, which exercised a strange fascination over her. She wanted to see the manager, to have him to dinner, to hail him as the first humorist in Europe. Then she protested that it was monstrous that she should have to pay to see an exhibition in which she herself was so leading an attraction. She was half inclined to demand her money back at the door, had it not been for the treat she had enjoyed in seeing herself as others, or, at any rate, that strict moralist who wrote the account of the figure, saw her. The Monument, the Zoological Gardens, the Underground Railway, even a most remarkable play at one of the West End theatres, where two ignoble gentlemen cut through a pack to see who should marry an heiress, both turning up sevens and then kings, had a touch of bathos after Madame Tussaud’s; and Leonard and Sophia went back there more than once and found the joke remained of that superlative order which is only enhanced by repetition. The Princess, even in her middle life, retained a youthful passion for being amused, but never, so she thought, had she made a better investment in joy than with those shillings she paid to the doorkeeper at the waxwork show.

She remained in England all August and September, and in the third week of that month Leonard went back to Eton. Sophia, who wished to see the place, paid him a visit there, and made herself remarkably popular by securing for the school the promise of an extra week in the next summer holidays, in honour of her visit. In eight weeks Leonard would be easily repaid for his four days’ journey to RhodopÉ, and she intended him to come home, for the first time since he went to Eton. Femme propose.

She was to leave England about the middle of October, and a week before she should have started she was back in London again from a round of visits. One morning she found on her breakfast-table a letter with the Eton postmark on it, but not addressed in Leonard’s hand. She opened it without apprehension, and read the following statement in the headmaster’s neat and scholarly handwriting:

‘Your Royal Highness,

‘Little did I think when we had the honour so short a time ago of welcoming your Royal Highness to Eton that it would be my painful duty to write this letter to you. Your son, Prince Leonard, was found last week to have visited the Windsor races, where he was seen smoking and talking to a successful jockey, whose equestrian skill, so it appeared, had been the means of winning your son a considerable sum of money. This offence could not, of course, be passed over, and it was my duty to visit it on him in the most severe manner—in short, I gave him a flogging. But he refused, apparently, to take the warning to heart, and yesterday evening his housemaster, going into his room, found him, with several other boys, engaged in a game of roulette. This was more particularly heinous, since I well remember how warmly your Royal Highness urged on us not to allow roulette in the school. I therefore beg to advise your Royal Highness to remove Prince Leonard at once from Eton, to save him the disgrace, which must otherwise be inevitable, of being expelled. The roulette-board I send to you to-day by parcel post. I must add that Prince Leonard was most anxious to have it understood that he had persuaded the others to play, in spite of their unwillingness.’