accepted it only on condition that the
presentation was private and kept out of the papers. It was not one but
fifty kindly deeds which stood to his credit. Always with the manners of
a Prince--gracious, courteous, and genial--never a word had passed his
lips of evil towards any human being. The barriers today between the
smoking room and the drawing room are shadowy things, and she knew very
well that he was held in a somewhat curious respect by men, as a person
to whom it was impossible to tell a story in which there was any shadow
of indelicacy. The ways of the so-called man of world seemed in his
presence as though they must be the ways of some creature of a different
and a lower stage of existence. A young man whom he had once corrected
had christened him, half jestingly, Sir Galahad, and certainly his
life in London, a life which had to bear all the while the test of the
limelight, had appeared to merit some such title. These thoughts chased
one another through her mind as she looked at him and marvelled. Surely
those other things must be part of a bad nightmare! It was not possible
that such a man could be associated with wrong-doing--such manner of
wrong-doing!

Even while these thoughts passed through her brain, he turned to talk to
her, and she felt at once that little glow of pleasure which the sound
of his voice nearly always evoked.

"I am looking forward so much," he said, "to my stay at Devenham. You
know, it will not be very much longer that I shall have the opportunity
of accepting such invitations."

"You mean that the time is really coming when we shall lose you?" she
asked suddenly.

"When my work is finished, I return home," he answered. "I fancy that it
will not be very long now."

"When you do leave England," she asked after a moment's pause, "do you
go straight to Japan?"

He bowed.

"With the Continent I have finished," he said. "The cruiser which His
Majesty has sent to fetch me waits even now at Southampton."

"You speak of your work," she remarked, "as though you had been
collecting material for a book."

He smiled.

"I have been busy collecting information in many ways," he
said,--"trying to live your life and feel as you feel, trying to
understand those things in your country, and in other countries too,
which seem at first so strange to us who come from the other side of the
East."

"And the end of it all?" she asked.

His eyes gleamed for a moment with a light which she d