Prince Rajput Singh, the mythical only son of the Nazir of Hydrabad, descended on Chicago two weeks later accompanied by J. Herbert Denby, the distinguished authority on Far Eastern affairs. Their arrival at the Senate Hotel just before the dinner hour was a spectacular divertissement, to say the least, and one well calculated to make the unsuspecting general public sit up and take notice.

His Royal Highness wore a great gray cloak when he passed through the main entrance of the hotel flanked on his right by the impeccable Mr. Denby and preceded by two massive and upstanding Hindus whose bearded faces were frozen into a semblance of stoical indifference that was as grim and forbidding as a box-office man’s impenetrable and imperturbable mask. On his head he wore a white turban trimmed with golden braid and his feet were encased in richly embroidered red slippers with turned-up toes.

He paused for a moment, surveying with a condescending air the crowd of gaping men which filled the lobby, and then clapped his hands sharply twice. The Hindu attendants moved into position back of him. Another pause and then, with a gesture of surpassing elegance he dropped the cloak from his shoulders into their waiting arms. No Roman emperor had ever done it better, Mr. Denby thought to himself. The prince stood revealed in a gorgeous silken robe which was such a shimmering mass of color that it almost made one blink to look at it. Purples, flaming shades of orange and greens which seemed to suggest the rank lush foliage of some tropical jungle were the predominating shades. The robe was admirably designed to set off to the best advantage the dark and finely chiseled features of His Royal Highness, who greeted the manager of the hotel with an air of haughty reserve that was positively imperial in its implications.

His progress through the lobby to the elevator was made amid a silence that Mr. Denby afterwards paradoxically referred to as “audible” and when the clanging doors closed behind him and he was shot up to his quarters on the third floor, the feelings of all the awed onlookers found expression in a concerted gasp.

Jimmy Martin, watching the proceedings from behind the cover of a newspaper which he pretended to be reading while he sprawled over a great leather chair, chuckled quietly to himself and agreed that he was a grand little stage manager. Then he slipped out on to windswept Michigan avenue and walked briskly away to his own hotel. He longed to remain and watch his drama unfold, but discretion warned him that it would be well for him to keep in seclusion for the present, inasmuch as representatives of the fourth estate would undoubtedly descend on the hotel shortly in a body.

Prince Rajput Singh graciously received the gentlemen of the press an hour later and discoursed at length upon the past, present and future of India. Hearing that his distinguished friend, the Sahib Denby, whom he had entertained some years ago at his father’s palace while the former was traveling in the far east, was planning a lecture tour he had decided, he said, to visit America himself and lend his aid to the project.

“It has been long dream of my existence,” he announced grandly, picking his words carefully, “to assist in bringing to new world of the west the culture and wisdom of the east. You have made wonderful discoveries in the world of material things. We have long ago found the secret of the soul. It is well we should make ourselves friends.”

The prince posed for flashlight photographs sitting in a great arm chair with his Hindu attendants, arms folded, standing erect and immovable behind him. All in all a pleasant time was had by everyone concerned and the results in the newspapers on the following morning were all that the most optimistic and sanguine publicity promoter could have desired. Two and three column pictures of His Royal Highness were given prominent positions and each interview was tagged with a paragraph announcing the first of Mr. Denby’s lectures which was to be given a day later in the grand ballroom of the hotel. The prince, it was announced, would supplement the lecturer’s remarks with a little talk of his own.

Jimmy Martin, calling on him for the purpose of giving him a few more instructions concerning his general deportment and demeanor on the morrow, was somewhat dazzled by the splendor of his surroundings and by the extent of the apartment assigned to him. There were five rooms in all, overlooking the lake, and there was a canopied bed on a raised platform in one of them as well as other evidences of extreme luxury to which he was not accustomed. He hunted up his friend, the assistant manager of the hotel.

“Say, Wilkins,” he said cautiously. “I’ve been up to see this prince you’ve got stopping here. That’s some set of rooms. I wonder what they’re going to set him back.”

“That’s the royal suite,” replied Wilkins. “We don’t get much of a chance to get any real royalty very often, and I’m making the old boy a special rate. Mr. Denby arranged for it. We’re only going to charge him two hundred dollars a day.”

“My God,” stammered Jimmy, almost swallowing his cigarette and clutching the other by the arm, “you can’t do a thing like that.”

The look of hopeless distress on the press agent’s face caused the hotel man to laugh uproariously, for a moment, but he checked himself suddenly.

“What’s the idea?” he inquired. “Why can’t we? You act as if we were going to charge the bill to you.”

“Maybe you are, old man,” was Jimmy’s response as he led Wilkins over to the latter’s little office. “I want to slip you a little side-line of conversation that you’ve got to promise to keep Masonic.”

So it came to pass that in the quiet sanctity of the little office Jimmy outlined certain unpublished details concerning the activities and real mission of Prince Rajput Singh though he said nothing about that dusky gentleman’s previous condition of servitude. He represented him as being a genuine Indian nobleman, temporarily down on his luck, who had consented to assist in a carefully contrived and ingenious scheme of indirect advertising.

“Have a heart, old man,” he pleaded when he had finished. “If you scale that two hundred down to about—well, say twenty-five and Bartlett’ll have heart failure even at that figure—I’ll arrange to have his royal niblets have dinner every night in your Egyptian dining room. You know yourself you don’t do much trade in there. We’ll have those two Hindu birds cook a lot of these curry dishes right there in full view of the audience and wait on him. You’ll be able to hang the little old S.R.O. sign out in a couple of days, take it from me.”

The assistant manager succumbed to Jimmy’s siren song and consented to slash the rate for the royal suite in return for the special performance by the prince and his entourage which the press agent promised to stage nightly.

Mr. J. Herbert Denby and Prince Rajput Singh made their joint debut on the lecture platform on the following afternoon before a select and soulful audience largely composed of middle-aged females who hung rapturously on every word uttered by both speakers.

Mr. Denby was in fine form. His discourse on “The Rig-Veda” was as vague and misty as a treatise on the Hegelian philosophy and about as full of real mental nourishment for that particular audience as a scientific monograph on the bony structure of the dactylopterus volitans would have been. He soared into the outer void and returned with bay-leaves on his brow and with esoteric phrases dripping from his tongue. The more hopelessly involved he became in the mystic mazes of his metaphysical theme, the more ardent seemed to be the rapt devotion with which his listeners received his remarks. When he finished in one grand, exultant outburst of poetic fervor a hushed silence fell upon the gathering and when a ripple of applause broke in upon it there were those whose brows darkened as if something holy had been profaned.

It remained, however, for the pseudo Prince Rajput Singh to achieve the real sensation of the afternoon. Arrayed in a purple robe and turban of exquisite silk and carrying himself with a careless air of superb distinction that was fascinating to watch, he delivered a brief talk in which he pleaded for a better understanding between the East and the West and urged a study of Indian ways and customs as the best method of bringing such an entente cordiale about, such a study as was rendered possible, for instance, by witnessing a performance of a play he had recently seen in New York—was it called “The Ganges Princess?”—he was not sure.

His dark face gleamed with animation as he spoke and his grey eyes sparkled. When he smiled his white teeth flashed brilliantly in the rays of the afternoon sun which poured through the mullioned windows and when he laughed, tossing his head back like some medieval troubadour in rollicking mood, all the impressionable women there present, young and old, went voyaging for a moment or two into the land of romance, and forgotten memory pictures of scenes from the Arabian Nights came trooping back into their several and respective, not to mention respectable, minds.

Taking it by and large Ranjit Lal, former supernumerary, devious adventurer in a foreign clime, and now, by the grace of one James T. Martin, Prince Rajput Singh, was, in the parlance of the boulevards, a knockout. When the formal festivities were over he was surrounded by a chattering swarm of females of assorted ages and subjected to that particular form of obsequious flattery which is usually reserved by the weaker sex for long-haired pianists and corpulent Italian tenors.

Mr. J. Herbert Denby, feeling himself somewhat out of the picture, viewed the proceedings from a short distance away and particularly noticed one worshiper who had edged herself into a position directly in front of his confrere and who seemed to be trying to entirely monopolize the swarthy-skinned lion of the occasion.

She was at least fifty. There was no doubting that, though she was dressed, with all the gay abandon of a debutante, in a silken frock which did not quite touch the tops of her extremely high boots. She was also inclined to stoutness, though a straight front corset kept her somewhat ample proportions cabined and confined permitting her to present to the world at large at least a semblance of curvilinear grace. There was, Mr. Denby thought, something decidedly suspicious looking about her flaxen tresses whose symmetrically marcelled regularity was relieved by two little curls which hung coyly in front of each ear. She was, it was plain to see, convinced that she was the living embodiment of Peter Pan, the young person who never grew old.

Mr. Denby could hear her high pitched voice and the gurgling laugh with which she punctuated almost every remark.

“I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, you dear man,” she was saying. “Four thirty tomorrow afternoon in our Indian room—I’ll have just a few notables there and I have just one favor to ask of you. Please bring those perfectly dear gentlemen with whiskers along to help serve. They’ll help my background? Don’t you just love the proper background? It’s so stimulating. Oh, yes, background is the most important thing in life, if you grasp what I mean.”

A grunt escaped a tired looking man next to Mr. Denby. It was so expressive that the eminent authority on the Far East turned a questioning look on his neighbor.

“Who is she?” he inquired.

“That’s Fannie Easton,” replied the tired-looking man. “Old maid sister of Junius P. You’ve heard of him, of course. Oodles of money, houses in Chicago and New York, ranch in California, villa in Florence, three private yachts and not a damned soul to decorate ’em with except that blond nut sundae. Life’s a weird thing, sir. Too much for me.”

Mr. Denby, forgetting his own isolation for the moment, watched the continuation of the episode with a new interest. He saw the gurgling Miss Easton catch hold of his associate’s arm and he observed that the latter was devoting himself to her with assiduous attention as they walked slowly out into the corridor and disappeared, leaving behind a collection of thoroughly disappointed admirers. As the echoes of a silly laugh came floating on the air from some unseen corner of the hallway, something seemed to tell Mr. Denby that all was not well.