co and some
transplanted from their English home. From where they sat they could
see the other guests moving in and out among the groves of orange and
olive trees and swaying palms, and standing, outlined against the blue
sky, upon the low, flat roof of the farm-house.

"I have dared to ask you to be so good as to give me this moment," the
Prince said humbly, "only because I am going away, and it may be my
last chance to speak with you. You do not mind? You do not think I
presume?"

"No, I do not mind," said the girl, smiling. "In my country we do not
think it a terrible offence to talk to a girl at a garden-party. But
you said there was something of importance you wanted to say to me.
You mean the expedition?"

"Yes," said Kalonay. "We start this evening." The girl raised her
head slightly and stared past him at the burning white walls and the
burning blue sky that lay outside the circle of shadow in which they
sat.

"This evening--" she repeated to herself.

"We reach there in two days," Kalonay continued; "and then we--then we
go on--until we enter the capital."

The girl's head was bent, and she looked at her hands as they lay in
her lap and frowned at them, they seemed so white and pretty and
useless.

"Yes, you go on," she repeated, "and we stay here. You are a man and
able to go on. I know what that means. And you like it," she added,
with a glance of mingled admiration and fear. "You are glad to fight
and to risk death and to lead men on to kill other men."

Kalonay drew lines in the sand with his ridingwhip, and did not raise
his head.

"I suppose it is because you are fighting for your home," the girl
continued, "and to set your country free, and that you can live with
your own people again, and because it is a holy war. That must be it.
Now that it is really come, I see it all differently. I see things I
had not thought about before. They frighten me," she said.

The Prince raised his head and faced the girl, clasping the end of his
whip nervously in his hand. "If we should win the island for the
King," he said, "I believe it will make a great change in me. I shall
be able to go freely then to my home, as you say, to live there always,
to give up the life I have led on the Continent. It has been a foolish
life--a dog's life--and I have no one to blame for it but myself. I
made it worse than it need to have been. But if we win, I have
promised myself that I will not return to i