l loveliness--all these things were sufficiently outside the
range of probabilities to encourage the development of his dream in a
comfortable direction.

"To-night," thought he, "I shall be eating a prosaic dinner at the Grand
Hotel, and the Grand Duchess Irene Yaroslav will be a remote personage
whom I shall only see in the picture papers, or possibly over the heads
of a crowd on her way to the railway station."

And so he was outrageously familiar. He ceased to "Highness" her,
laughed at her jokes and in turn provoked her to merriment. The meal
came to an end too soon for him, but not too soon for the nodding
dowager nor the silent, contemplating priest, who had worn through his
period of saintly abstraction and had grown most humanly impatient.

The girl looked at her watch.

"Good gracious," she said, "it is four o'clock and I have promised to go
to tennis." (Malcolm loathed tennis from that hour.)

He took his leave of her with a return to something of the old
ceremonial.

"Your Grand Ducal Highness has been most gracious," he said, but she
arrested his eloquence with a little grimace.

"Please, remember, Mr. Hay, that I shall be a Grand Ducal Highness for
quite a long time, so do not spoil a very pleasant afternoon by being
over-punctilious."

He laughed.

"Then I will call you----"

He came to a dead end, and the moment was embarrassing for both, though
why a Grand Ducal Highness should be embarrassed by a young engineer she
alone might explain.

Happily there arrived most unexpectedly the Grand Duke himself, and if
his appearance was amazing, as it was to judge by the girl's face, his
geniality was sensational.

He crossed the hall and gripped the young man's hand.

"You're not going, Mr. Hay?" he asked. "Come, come, I have been a very
bad host, but I do not intend to let you go so soon! I have much that I
want to talk to you about. You are the engineer in charge of the Ukraine
Oil Field, is it not so? Excellent! Now, I have oil on my estate in the
Urals but it has never been developed...."

He took the young man by the arm and led him through the big doors to
the garden, giving him no chance to complete or decently postpone his
farewell to the girl, who watched with undisguised amazement this
staggering affability on the part of her parent.

CHAPTER IX

THE HAND AT THE WINDOW

An hour later she came from tennis, to find her father obviously bored
almost to the point of tears, yet