ut your role in this little affair."

"Why?"

"Because I am afraid of Prince Shan," he answered deliberately.

She looked at him from behind her fan. Her eyes sparkled with interest.
If there were any other feeling underneath, she showed no trace of it.

"What a queer word for you to use!"

He nodded.

"I know it. I would back you, Lady Maggie, to hold your own against any
male creature breathing, of your own order and your own race, but Prince
Shan plays the game differently. He possesses every gift which women and
men both admire, but he hasn't our standards. Life for him means power.
A wish for him entails its fulfilment."

"You are afraid," Maggie suggested, still with the laughter in her eyes,
"that he will trifle with my affections?"

"Something like that," he admitted bluntly. "Prince Shan will be here
for a week--perhaps a fortnight. When he goes, he goes a very long
distance away."

"I may decide to marry him," Maggie said. "One gets rather tired here of
the regular St. George's, Hanover Square, business, and all that comes
afterwards."

"Dear Lady Maggie," Chalmers replied, "that is the trouble. Prince Shan
would never marry you."

"Why not?" she asked simply.

"First of all," Chalmers went on, after a moment's hesitation, "because
Prince Shan, broad-minded though he seems to be and is on all the great
questions of the world, still preserves something of what we should call
the superstition of his country and order. I believe, in his own mind,
he looks upon himself as being one of the few elect of the earth. He
travels, he is gracious everywhere, but though his manner is the
perfection of form, in his heart he is still aloof. He rides through the
clouds from Asia, and he leaves always something of himself over there
on the other side. Let me tell you this, Lady Maggie. I have never
forgotten it. He was at Harvard in my year, and so far as he unbent to
any one, he sometimes unbent to me. I asked him once whether he were
ever going to marry. He shook his head and sighed. 'I can never marry,'
he replied. 'Why not?' I asked him. 'Because there are no women of the
Shan line alive,' he answered. Later, he took pity on my bewilderment.
He let me understand. For two thousand years, no Shan has married, save
one of his own line. To ally himself with a princess of the royal house
of England would be a mesalliance which would disturb his ancestors in
their graves. Of course, this sounds to us very ridiculo