row up your soul and freeze
your blood."

Wherewith he suavely told her everything about Paul Vanderhoffen's
origin and the alternatives now offered him, and she listened without
comment.

"Ai! ai!" young Vanderhoffen perorated; "the situation is complete. I
have not the least desire to be Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg. It is
too abominably tedious. But, if I do not join in with Desmarets, who
has the guy-ropes of a restoration well in hand, I must inevitably
be--removed, as the knave phrases it. For as long as I live, I will be
an insuperable barrier between Augustus and his Sophia. Otototoi!" he
wailed, with a fine tone of tragedy, "the one impossible achievement in
my life has always been to convince anybody that it was mine to dispose
of as I elected!"

"Oh, man proposes----" she began, cryptically. Then he deliberated,
and sulkily submitted: "But I may not even propose to abdicate.
Augustus has put himself upon sworn record as an eye-witness of my
hideous death. And in consequence I might keep on abdicating from now
to the crack of doom, and the only course left open to him would be to
treat me as an impostor."

She replied, with emphasis, "I think your cousin is a beast!"

"Ah, but the madman is in love," he pleaded. "You should not judge
poor masculinity in such a state by any ordinary standards. Oh really,
you don't know the Princess Sophia. She is, in sober truth, the nicest
person who was ever born a princess. Why, she had actually made a mock
of even that handicap, for ordinarily it is as disastrous to feminine
appearance as writing books. And, oh, Lord! they will be marrying her
to me, if Desmarets and I win out." Thus he forlornly ended.

"The designing minx!" Miss Claridge said, distinctly.

"Now, gracious lady, do be just a cooing pigeon and grant that when men
are in love they are not any more encumbered by abstract notions about
honor than if they had been womanly from birth. Come, let's be lyrical
and open-minded," he urged; and he added, "No, either you are in love
or else you are not in love. And nothing else will matter either way.
You see, if men and women had been primarily designed to be rational
creatures, there would be no explanation for their being permitted to
continue in existence," he lucidly explained. "And to have grasped
this fact is the pith of all wisdom."

"Oh, I am very wise." A glint of laughter shone in her eyes. "I would
claim to be another Pythoness