"Not if they see him first!" I replied grimly, and he went out.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PRINCE--PRINCIPALLY

It was all well enough for me to say--as I had to to Tillie many a
time--that it was ridiculous to make a fuss over a person for what,
after all, was an accident of birth. It was well enough for me to say
that it was only by chance that I wasn't strutting about with a crown on
my head and a man blowing a trumpet to let folks know I was coming, and
by the same token and the same chance Prince Oskar might have been a
red-haired spring-house girl, breaking the steels in her figure stooping
over to ladle mineral water out of a hole in the earth.

Nevertheless, at five o'clock, after every one had gone, when I saw Miss
Patty, muffled in furs, tripping out through the snow, with a tall thin
man beside her, walking very straight and taking one step to her four, I
felt as though somebody had hit me at the end of my breast-bone.

They stopped a minute outside before they came in, and I had to take
myself in hand.

"Now look here, Minnie, you idiot," I said to myself, "this is America;
you're as good as he is; not a bend of the knee or a stoop of the neck.
And if he calls you 'my good girl' hit him."

They came in together, laughing and talking, and, to be honest, if I
hadn't caught the back of a chair, I'd have had one foot back of the
other and been making a courtesy in spite of myself.

"We're late, Minnie!" Miss Patty said. "Oskar, this is one of my best
friends, and you are to be very nice to her."

He had one of those single glass things in his eye and he gave me a good
stare through it. Seen close he was handsomer than Mr. Pierce, but he
looked older than his picture.

"Ask her if she won't be nice to me," he said in as good English as
mine, and held out his hand.

"Any of Miss Patty's friends--" I began, with a lump in my throat, and
gave his hand a good squeeze. I thought he looked startled, and suddenly
I had a sort of chill.

"Good gracious!" I exclaimed, "should I have kissed it?"

They roared at that, and Miss Patty had to sit down in a chair.

"You see, she knows, Oskar," she said. "The rest are thinking and
perhaps guessing, but Minnie is the only one that knows, and she never
talks. Everybody who comes here tells Minnie his troubles."

"But--am I a trouble?" he asked in a low tone. I was down in the spring,
but I heard it.

"So far you have hardly been an unalloyed joy," she replied,