is. The
artist who designs my frocks was positively inspired the last time I sat
to him. I am going to see Maurice in a few weeks, and meanwhile I have
several new flirtations which interest me amazingly. As for you, my
child, one would imagine that you had lost your taste for all frivolity.
You are as cold as granite. Be careful, dear. The men of to-day, in this
country, at any rate, are spoilt. Sometimes they are even uncourtier-like
enough to accept a woman's refusal."

"Well," Anna observed, smiling faintly, "even a lifetime at Court has not
taught me to dissimulate. I am heavy-hearted, Mildred. You wondered what
I was looking at when I gazed over those green trees under which all
those happy people were walking. I was looking out across the North Sea.
I was looking through Belgium to Paris. I saw a vast curtain roll up, and
everything beyond it was a blood-stained panorama."

A shade rested for a moment on her companion's fair face. She shrugged
her shoulders.

"We've known for a long time, dear, that it must come."

"But all the same, in these last moments it is terrible," Anna insisted.
"Seriously, Mildred, I wonder that I should feel it more than you. You
are absolutely English. Your father is English, your mother is English.
It is only your husband that is Austrian. You have lived in Austria only
for seven years. Has that been sufficient to destroy all your patriotism,
all your love for your own country?"

The Princess made a little grimace.

"My dear Anna," she said, "I am not so serious a person as you are. I am
profoundly, incomprehensibly selfish. The only human being in the whole
world for whom I have had a spark of real affection is Maurice, and I
adore him. What he has told me to do, I have done. What makes him happy
makes me happy. For his sake, even, I have forgotten and shall always
forget that I was born an Englishwoman. Circumstances, too," she went on
thoughtfully, "have made it so easy. England is such a changed country.
When I was a child, I could read of the times when our kings really
ruled, of our battles for dominion, of our fight for colonies, of our
building up a great empire, and I could feel just a little thrill. I
can't now. We have gone ahead of Napoleon. From a nation of shop-keepers
we have become a nation of general dealers--a fat, over-confident,
bourgeois people. Socialism has its hand upon the throat of the classes.
Park Lane, where our aristocracy lived, is filled with the