A few days afterwards Princess Sophia herself started on her return to RhodopÉ. The Felatrune was to meet her at Monte Carlo, but she crossed France overland. Her original scheme had been to go by sea all the way, but this saving of time caused by crossing the Continent gave her a balance of eight days, which she proposed to spend on the Riviera, where she lost a good deal of money.

Even in the few months of her absence, the change which had come over her mountain kingdom was startling. The crowd of foreign visitors, chiefly English, had never been so great, nor the season so brilliant. November in RhodopÉ is the month of months, clear, cool, and bracing, with a sun of heavenly purity, and a wind just frappÉ with the snows which have fallen on the higher ranges of the Balkan. The air has a sparkle as if of frost in it, a translucent brightness which in the North we associate with the white rime of autumn mornings. To the Princess, fresh from the damp gray of England, and the tawdry theatrical brilliance of the Riviera, her home seemed an enchanted place, and for once she was glad to get back.

The club had pushed the limits of its gardens and kiosques up the slopes of the hills behind Amandos; bandstands and boulevards were loud with the orchestra and gay with colour. Even Monte Carlo seemed to her empty and depopulated in comparison. But the place was changed in other ways. The discipline of the army was relaxed; a Bill had been introduced in the House, and passed without opposition, which abolished conscription, and though the people were as picturesque as ever, they were infinitely more idle. The demands for provisions and wines consequent on the ever-increasing hosts of foreigners who flocked to the town had made living easier than ever. A man could work two days a week where he had worked six a few years ago, and yet find his earnings undiminished. It had been necessary to limit the number of members of the club, and in consequence a hundred other gaming-houses had been started, and deep into the hours of the night shepherds and sailors watched the roulette-marbles, which rolled as unceasingly as the stars of heaven.

Sophia was almost frightened at the success of the era she had inaugurated, and she was truly shocked at the deterioration which counterbalanced the increased prosperity. She had still, even in her forty-first year, a strong love of keen eyes and fit limbs; her admiration for a fine rider still warred with her respect for a bold player, and she saw to her dismay that a nation of gamblers tends to lose its grip of the saddle. The Life Guards were a mockery of horsemen; they were growing pale and fat, and when they received her on the quay of MavromÁti, she was horrified to observe that they were sleepy-eyed and unerect—a regiment of putty soldiers. She herself, who could still, as in the days when Petros came a-courting, watch the tide of gold ebbing and flowing on the green tables for hour after hour when she should have been asleep, without suffering for it next morning, saw that if the common folk sat up at roulette all night, their parade on the following day lost its briskness. But her regret passed; the town was full of amusing people, and she had a series of house-parties with her from November until the New Year fÊtes were over. She was well entertained, and as she was one of those to whom boredom is a pain more exquisite than earache, she found that so long as it was entirely absent, her mind was distracted from the consideration of the deteriorated physique of her people.

Leonard’s letters also were full of consolation. They were so crammed with excruciating facts about mosques and minarets that Sophia was wholly incapable of reading them, and put the interminable sheets into her desk, gratefully feeling that her experiment was brimming with success. His tutor, she was informed, had fallen ill of typhoid at Cairo, and Leonard was purposing to spend a month up the Nile while he was recovering, a trip which he told her was well likely to repay a visit. The pyramids of Sakkarah which he had just seen were magnificent beyond description. As she knew, the Great Step Pyramid was there, a magnificent structure of the Sixth Dynasty, while closer at hand were the great pyramids of Gizeh, the tombs of Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus, or Menkau, as he was more properly called. ArchÆologists were disagreed as to the date of the Sphinx; for himself, he was inclined to side with Mariette ... and Sophia murmured, ‘Dear boy!’ and read no further, merely glancing at the last of the sixteen sides he had written her, which contained an account of a usaptiu figure he had just purchased from a dealer, which he had every reason to believe was genuine, and not imported from Manchester for the ignorant tourist.

His next letter gave a most exhaustive historical account of the temple of Karnak, and a description of the tombs of the kings, which he urged his mother to see. In a few days she could get across to Port Said, and a week afterwards they would be standing together lost in wonder at the monuments of the Pharaohs. It was a liberal education, he said, to visit Egypt; already in a few weeks he had learned more than his three years at Eton had taught him. As a series, indeed, the letters really resembled pages of a guide-book, so conscientious were they and so unreadable. The next letter, after an interval of some six weeks, was merely dated s.s. Ammon; but it described the holy city of Benares, where there is a golden statue of Buddha twenty-five feet tall, the alligators in the Hooghly, and the methods of the manufacturing of filigree work. This was all as it should be, and Sophia’s belief in her experiment became a creed with her. It no longer an experiment; it was an assured success.

The spring passed into summer, and summer into autumn, and still Sophia was deluged with floods of categorical information. Leonard had been away a year, and the tutor, having successfully battled with typhoid in Egypt, had unfortunately fallen a victim to yellow fever in the West Indies. Leonard duly reported this to his mother, but declined altogether to have another tutor. While the first lived he had continually been tied in one place by his ailments, and he proposed to do the rest of his journeying alone. He was now in Boston, U.S.A., where there was a remarkably fine statue of George Washington; his mother would doubtless recollect that this eminent statesman (one of the brightest men the Western continent had ever produced) was notably truthful. In fact, the story of his childhood, etc. He was now going an excursion among some Indian tribes, and he hoped in his next to give some account of wigwams, Yosemite, and squaws.

Sophia could not understand it. Was the boy going to grow up a pedant? She almost preferred that he should be a gambler.

The Princess left RhodopÉ that year in November, twelve months after Leonard’s departure. Her soi-disant visits to her relatives were unusually protracted, for the tables constantly backed her luck, and it was already May, the almond blossoms were over and the House was sitting, when she returned to Amandos. She was beginning to get very stout, but she found consolation for this in the advice of her doctor, who recommended her a month at Carlsbad in the summer. That month lengthened itself to six weeks, and on her arrival in RhodopÉ again in the autumn her neglect of her duties became more edifying than ever. For one reason or another the visitors to the capital were much diminished in this year; the death of her aunt, the Princess Olga, had thrown the Court into mourning for a month, and time hung terribly on her hands.

It was during this enforced absence from the club, in obedience to etiquette, but meaningless to her—for her aunt was one of the most sour-tempered women God ever made, and mourning for her death was of a farcical nature—that the Princess, in an excess of ennui, began those practices which have been censured so severely, and which even the indulgent historian must stigmatize as undignified. Night after night she would steal out from one of the private doors of the palace, and, disguised as well as might be like a widow, with a pair of spectacles, a bombazine jacket, and a thick veil, make her way to one of the numerous gaming-houses which held out their signs in every street in Amandos. For fear she should be recognised, she dared not go to her own club, where it would be certain she would meet someone she knew, and who knew her well enough to pierce her somewhat transparent disguise; and for the same reason she would not go to any of the houses frequented by the upper class of her people. Instead, she would skulk along unfrequented thoroughfares and narrow streets until she came to some sorry restaurant, over which there would be a low, dingy room, ill ventilated, and thick with the acrid fumes of inferior tobacco, and there she would play perhaps for hours, in stakes limited to ten or twelve francs. In this she would do violence to her better nature, for often the roulette-boards were as pitiable as that which had so roused her anger against Leonard, thus showing that they were contraband, and not supplied by the Government monopoly; but gambling had become a necessity to her, and she would have played with any wretch, however depraved, on any board, however infamous. The pathos of the situation lay in the fact that she was constantly recognised, but her loyal people, sympathizing with her in being deprived of her games at the club, owing to this meaningless etiquette, never gave a sign that they knew her. Certainly, also, there was a curious attraction to her in the very squalor of the surroundings. To be elbowed by hairy sailors, to be smothered in musk by the wives of smaller tradesmen, excited her by its strange incongruity. Lombroso, so she told herself, would certainly have diagnosed her practices as belonging to one who showed the early stages of egalo-megalomania, or some such mental deformation, but, as she also told herself, nothing could matter less than what Lombroso said.

At other times she would even dine at the restaurants below, with a secret gusto for the abominable food, and the sort of joy a miser must feel, to know that in the palace her French chef was in the middle of his inimitable alchemy, changing for her the raw material of his craft into an artist’s dream. The daily risk of detection she ran at the hands of her own servants even amused her, and she liked to see the blank, masklike wonder of their faces when she told them that she would have dinner at a quarter to eleven, little knowing that they were perfectly aware what she was going to do in the interval. To her, gambling had become as imperative as a dipsomaniac’s cravings, and the death of her sour aunt made it a necessity to her to indulge her passion, as she thought, secretly. It interested her also to find how much the secrecy and squalor of these adventures resembled those of her remote cousin the Empress Catherine of Russia. How strange a thing is heredity!

But the month of mourning passed, and she resumed her seat in the club. Letters from Leonard still reached her, but she scarcely read them; and though she loved the lad, and no sight would have been so welcome to her as his face, yet she determined to keep him abroad as long as possible. He had been away two years, and he would now be just twenty. He should come back to Amandos to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, but if she had her way, not a day before that.

Again the winter passed, again the seemingly interminable tedium of business was suspended on the last day of December; again she thanked her Ministers for their services to the country during the past year; and as soon as the New Year festivities were over, she was off on the new Felatrune, a yacht she had built with her winnings of the past twelve months, for Monte Carlo. There her presence had become so regular and assiduous, that the urbane manager had named one of the new rooms the Princess’s Salon. She had a beautiful villa on the hills above the town, which was generally full of guests; and while she was there this room was reserved, unless she sent a message that she would not play that day, for herself and her friends, but such days were few. It was built at an angle of the Casino, and a little private lawn stretched down in front of it to a terrace overlooking the sea. Crocuses, narcissi and daffodils were sown all over the grass, and in the early spring it used to look like a foreground of one of Fra Angelico’s pictures. Inside the room was divinely appointed, but less like Fra Angelico’s pictures. It was walled with crimson satin, and had a moulded gilt arabesque along the top; the floor was of parqueted oak, with thick Persian rugs; on the mantelpiece was a bronze dorÉ clock by Vernier, which told the hours unceasingly. On the right of the croupier’s place the Empress’s chair of walnut wood, with little SÈvres plaques let into the arms; on the back was inlaid her monogram underneath her crown.

The party with her was often enough to fill the room, for her house was usually full of the orthodox; but when there was a place or so vacant, the Princess would often stroll round the public rooms, and if she saw there an acquaintance who played well, that is, high and with the calmness of conviction, she would invite him to join her table. As a rule her party would meet at her room for an hour or two before dinner, adjourn again till half-past nine or so, and then continue the game till two or three in the morning. Sometimes, when the roulette proved more than usually exciting, and luck adorably capricious, it would be prolonged to a later hour; and as the nights got shorter, it was no rare thing for them to see morning break in thin lines of red on the eastern horizon, and the dim dark change to an ethereal gray before they left the Casino for the Princess’s villa.

For many weeks Sophia had had no word of any kind from Leonard, but as his last letter had that he was going to shoot bears (Ursa major) in the Rockies, she concluded, with all the enviable calm of a mind which never knew anxiety, that where Ursa major is plentiful, there also postal arrangements are correspondingly scarce. Thus his continued silence was scarcely noticeable to her, and, at any rate, she was so happily constituted that no fear that bears had devoured him ever occurred to her. When he came back from shooting bears, no doubt he would write to her.

The month of April this year had been peculiarly seasonable; the lucid atmosphere of summer had come, but not its heats; the freshness of spring remained, but its armoury of squalls was spent, and seldom in her life had the Princess enjoyed a more delectable score of days. Her Ministers at RhodopÉ, she was pleased to observe, at length entirely understood her, and the completeness with which they indulged her intolerance of State affairs was worthy of the Regency of Petros. She was still, as in the days of her girlhood, a fervent lover of the sea, and no morning failed to see her scudding up and down the coast in her little cutter, and with the same regularity an hour before her dÉjeuner she would be put ashore opposite her little tent on the beach, and have a long swim before luncheon. No watering-place bather was she; her bathing was no affair of a ducking of the head, a few random strokes, and a bubbling cry. With a boat a hundred yards behind her, she would swim out not less than half a mile from shore, rest a little, floating with arms out-stretched in the rocking cradle of the waves, and then head back for the shore. This exercise and the bracing water kept her young, and while those only half her age would find but a rotten world welcoming them to their lunch, after watching the dawn from the little red room, hers was a brisk step, a feeling of slight well-earned fatigue, a joyous elasticity of spirit, and the appetite of a youth. She drank wine but sparingly, and in spite of her increasing stoutness, she was still a woman to whom the eyes of men were drawn as steel to the magnet, and none bore her years with half so good a grace as she.

But the early days of May brought straight the balance of imperfection of this world and its weather. A stifling sirocco blew day after day out of the south, bringing with it, you would have said, all the scorching of the Libyan Desert and all the moisture of the sea it passed over. For five days it blew without intermission, and on the morning of the fifth the heat was rendered doubly intolerable by a great bank of ominous clouds which spread eastwards over the sky at right angles to the current of the wind. These were fat and fleecy, like blankets, and like blanketed fever patients were those that stifled beneath them. Princess Sophia alone was a shining exception to the rest of the limp world; she had much enjoyed her buffeting with a gray and angry sea, and she received her guests who collected in the drawing-room before lunch with all her vivacious cordiality. Princess Aline of Luxemburg was one of these, Prince Victor of Strelitz another; the rest were mainly English, and all were gamblers of the most honourable order.

‘You call it a terrible day, Aline!’ cried the Princess. ‘My dear, what do you know of the day? It may be delightful, for all you know. If I had stayed in my bedroom as long as you, I should be dead by now. You slept, or tried to sleep, till eleven.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Princess Aline.

‘How? Because I was in the cutter—a very rough sea this morning—and it so happened that my opera-glass was on the house. I saw a blind go up; I knew it was the blind of your room. I looked at the time, and it was eleven. Oh, why was I not a detective? What a series of simple and acute deductions!’

‘Do you consider it a pleasant day, Sophia?’ asked her cousin, Prince Victor.

‘Dear Victor, to me every day is a pleasant day, except in RhodopÉ. How is it possible to be more happy than I am? I have an admirable digestion. Yes; is lunch ready? Let us come in. I have luck at the cards. I slept for six hours like a tired child, as Shelley says. I have swum a mile. I had no letters to worry me this morning, and my nation has no history. Happy is the Princess whose nation has no history!’

‘The club, is not that history?’ asked Lady Blanche, who was of the party.

‘A chapter only—a paragraph only. It cannot make history alone, and positively nothing else has happened in RhodopÉ for thirty years.’

‘Something nearly happened once,’ remarked Blanche.

‘Yes, dear Blanche, and you proved yourself my best and only friend, and my worst enemy. Oh, I am not ungrateful; you know that. But think: if only I had been deposed eighteen years ago, what garnered happiness had been mine by now!’

The Princess’s admirable English, as usual, provoked a laugh, but she scarcely paused to join in it herself.

‘Only think: for eighteen years I should have been a free woman—one of those happy individuals whose luncheon-parties and whose tea-parties are not recorded in the daily papers! Great Heaven! to be recorded in the daily papers makes the happiness of some women. Yes, Blanche, but for you I should have been one who does as she chooses. What nonsense is that which we are told of free-will! For my class there is no such thing. We do not wish or want or desire to go to lunch with the Mayor, yet we go. On the other hand, Mayors are inevitable. What is supposed to happen when free-will is opposed to that which is inevitable? Does no one know? How ignorant!’

‘Be truthful, Sophia,’ said Princess Aline, ‘and tell me when last you went to lunch with an inevitable Mayor.’

‘You are getting personal, Aline,’ said the other.

‘We will draw our conclusions, then.’

‘Dear Aline, draw what you like; the principle is the same. If I have not been to lunch with a Mayor for as long as you choose to suppose, I have vanquished the inevitable. If any of you had been in my place, you would have lunched with the Mayor once every week-day, and twice on Sundays.’

‘A day of rest,’ observed Blanche.

‘Yes, you would have slept afterwards,’ said Sophia. ‘Ouf! but it is hot. The house is abominable on a day like this.’

After lunch they broke up again, Princess Aline announcing without shame that she intended to lie on her bed and sleep, if possible, till tea. Prince Victor, less honest, took a large chair in the veranda, and pretended to read; but before long the book fell heavily to the ground, and he snored without restraint. The others, with the exception of Sophia and Blanche, said they were going to write letters, and the Princess laughed at them.

‘Aline is the only honest one of you all,’ she said, ‘and Blanche and I are the only people awake. Blanche, I ordered the horses for half-past two; we will leave these shameless people. The view from the hills under this great pall of cloud will be magnificent. See how near and distinct everything has become! The wind has gone down; we shall have thunder. I always win when it thunders.’

As Sophia had said, the wind had ceased, and the air hung as heavy as a pall over the mountain-side. The noise of the sea filled the air, but the waves no longer broke; a great thunderous, oily swell swept up to the shore, and poured its volumes of water ponderously on the beach. Far out to sea an ocean-going steamer was ploughing its way eastwards, and as the swell caught and lifted her, they could see now the whole deck slanted perilously towards them, and now she would be but a black line in the trough of the sea. Overhead a mottled floor of cloud obscured the sky, so lowering that it seemed almost within a stone’s-throw. The olive-trees on the slope were unruffled by wind, and the very leaves of the trees hung drooping as if sleeping uneasily. The horses were as if tired by a long gallop, though they had not been out of the stables except for exercising, and went heavily. Their riders alone seemed unaffected by the weather, and their talk turned, as was not uncommon, on the tables.

‘There seem to be rather fewer people here than usual,’ said the Princess. ‘A few years ago May was always crowded.’

‘And now Amandos is crowded,’ remarked Lady Blanche.

‘Yes. How delightful not to be at Amandos! Blanche, I have sometimes wondered—usually on Sunday evenings—whether it was really a good thing for RhodopÉ when I started the club. Of course, the wealth of the country is enormously increased, but after all, has one not sacrificed something else—the spirit of the land, the spirit of the mountains, and the great out-of-doors?’

‘If you think so, restore it.’

‘I cannot,’ said Sophia—‘I simply cannot; RhodopÉ without the tables would be impossible to me. Oh, Blanche, why did you save my throne? I almost wish I had received a polite note from Petros saying that the Assembly had dethroned my House. Yet it was a great stroke, and I have seldom been so excited as I was during that sledge-drive up from MavromÁti, when we did not know if we should be in time. Dear me, how splendidly punctual I was on that day! What a thunderstorm we had in Corfu when I set out! The day was not unlike this afternoon.’

Blanche laughed.

‘Abdicate, then,’ she said. ‘Send for Prince Leonard to seat himself on your throne.’

‘Ah, if he would only come! But I think he would be no better than I. He was expelled from Eton, or rather I withdrew him, as you know, for playing roulette.’

‘Do you think his travels may not have cured him?’ asked Lady Blanche.

‘How can one cure a passion? It is incurable. You may repress it, but it is always there. True, I hope it is so much repressed that it will not break out. Perhaps you may even call it cured. But what self-respecting young man would banish himself to RhodopÉ, especially one who has the instinct for play, if there was no club?’

‘When will he be back?’ asked Blanche.

‘I don’t know. I have not heard from him for weeks. He was to shoot bears, I think he said. It seems hardly worth while to go to America to do that. Look how magnificent the view is! It was worth our while to come.’

They got back about five o’clock, and after tea drove down to the Casino. The rooms were very empty, and a restless, unsettled atmosphere was abroad. Over the sea from time to time came blinks of remote lightning, and rumblings of thunder, like the sound of a gong very far away. Even roulette somehow seemed monotonous, in such poor spirits were the Princess’s guests, and it was a relief to her when dinner-time came, for there was no such tonic to the mind as dinner.

As they dined, the storm moved nearer, and while they drank their coffee on the terrace, they watched a continuous play of violet-coloured lightning southwards over the sea, and the noise of the thunder began to overscore the hoarse voice of the swell on the beach below. A few drops of rain, warm and large, splashed down on the terrace like sudden frogs, and the tension of the atmosphere grew unbearable. Even Sophia felt it.

‘Something is going to happen,’ she cried, as they entered the Casino doors—‘something is going to happen fit for the lightning to look at and the thunder to listen to. I am excited! I am delightfully excited!’