an find
out. As it was at the bottom, it must have been one of the first."

"How could the news have travelled so fast?" said Paul.

The maid came in. Questioned, she said that just after Paul had gone
upstairs, and while Jane was at the telephone, a chauffeur had
presented the card. He belonged to a great lighted limousine in which
sat a lady in hat and dark veil. According to her orders, she had said
that Mr. Finn was dead, and the chauffeur had gone away and she had
shut the door.

The maid was dismissed. Paul stood on the hearthrug with bent brows,
his hands in his jacket pockets. "I can't understand it," he said.

"She must ha' come straight from the Town Hall," said Barney Bill.

"But she wasn't there," cried Paul.

"Sonny," said the old fellow, "if you're always dead sure of where a
woman is and where a woman isn't, you're a wiser man than Solomon with
all his wives and other domestic afflictions."

Paul threw the card into the fire. "It doesn't matter where she was,"
said he. "It was a very polite--even a gracious act to send in her card
on her way home. But it makes no difference to what I was talking
about. What have I got to do with princesses? They're out of my sphere.
So are Naiads and Dryads and Houris and Valkyrie and other fabulous
ladies. The Princess Zobraska has nothing to do with the question."

He made a step towards Jane and, his hand on her shoulder, looked at
her in his new, masterful way. "I come in the most solemn hour and in
the crisis of my life to ask you to marry me. My father, whom I've only
learned to love and revere to-night, is lying dead upstairs. To-night I
have cut away all bridges behind me. I go into the unknown. We'll have
to fight, but we'll fight together. You have courage, and I at least
have that. There's a seat in Parliament which I'll have to fight for
afterwards like a dog for a bone, and an official position which brings
in enough bread and-butter--"

"And there's a fortune remarked Barney Bill.

"What do you mean?" Paul swung round sharply.

"Yer father's fortune, sonny. Who do yer suppose he was a-going to
leave it to? 'Omes for lost 'orses or Free Zionists? I don't know as
'ow I oughter talk of it, him not buried yet--but I seed his will when
he made it a month or two ago, and barring certain legacies to Free
Zionists and such-like lunatic folk, not to speak of Jane ere being
left comfortably off, you're the residuary legatee, sonny--with
something like a h