and fortune after he had left Drane's
Court. In the meanwhile he glowed with the ambition to leave it in his
newly acquired splendour, drums beating, banners flying, the young
prince returning to his romantic and mysterious solitude.

The time was approaching when he should get up. He sent for his
luggage. The battered trunk and portmanteau plastered with the labels
of queer provincial towns did not betray great wealth. Nor did the
contents, taken out by the man-servant and arranged in drawers by the
nurse. His toilet paraphernalia was of the simplest and scantiest. His
stock of frayed linen and darned underclothes made rather a poor little
heap on the chair. He watched the unpacking somewhat wistfully from his
bed; and, like many another poor man, inwardly resented his poverty
being laid bare to the eyes of the servants of the rich.

The only thing that the man seemed to handle respectfully--as a
recognized totem of a superior caste--was a brown canvas case of golf
clubs, which he stood up in a conspicuous corner of the room. Paul had
taken to the Ancient and Royal game when first he went on tour, and it
had been a health-giving resource during the listless days when there
was no rehearsal or no matinee--hundreds of provincial actors, to say
nothing of retired colonels and such-like derelicts, owe their
salvation of body and soul to the absurd but hygienic pastime--and with
a naturally true eye and a harmonious body trained to all demands on
its suppleness in the gymnasium, proficiency had come with little
trouble. He was a born golfer; for the physically perfect human is a
born anything physical you please. But he had not played for a long
time. Half-crowns had been very scarce on this last disastrous tour,
and comrades who included golf in their horizon of human possibilities
had been rarer. When would he play again? Heaven knew! So he looked
wistfully, too, at his set of golf clubs. He remembered how he had
bought them--one by one.

"Do you want this on the dressing table?" The nurse held up a little
oblong case.

It was his make-up box, luckily tied round with string.

"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed. He wished he could have told her to
burn it. He felt happier when all his belongings were stowed away out
of sight and the old trunk and portmanteau hauled out of the room.

Colonel Winwood came home and asked his sister pertinent questions. He
was a bald, sad-looking man with a long grizzling moustache that