picture in his hands--it was not too unwieldy,
even in its frame--and examined it with nose so close to the painted
surface that he seemed to be smelling it. Then he turned it over and
scowled at its reverse. And shook a baffled head.

But when he tapped the face of the picture smartly with a finger-nail, he
gave a slight start, passed a hand over it with the palm pressed flat, and
suddenly assumed the humanly intelligent expression of a hunting-dog that
has hit on a warm scent.

Strong fingers and a fruit knife quickly extracted the painting from its
frame and loosened the canvas from its stretcher, proving that the latter
held in fact two canvases instead of one. Between these had been secreted
several sheets of notepaper of two kinds, stamped with two crests, all
black with closely penned handwriting.

Lanyard gathered them into a sheaf and scanned them cursorily, even with
distaste. True enough, it might be argued that he had bought and paid for
the right to pry into the secrets they betrayed; but it was not a right he
enjoyed exercising. A fairly thoroughgoing state of sophistication,
together with some innate instincts of delicacy, worked to render him to a
degree immune to such gratification as others might derive from being made
privy to an exotic affair of the heart. Revelation of human weakness was no
special treat to him. And if his eyebrows mounted as he read, if the
corners of his mouth drew down, if once and again he uttered an "_Oh! oh!_"
of shocked expostulation, he was (like most of us, incurably an actor in
private as well as in public life) merely running through business which
convention has designated as appropriate to such circumstances. At bottom
he was being stimulated to thought more than to derision.

Putting the letters aside, he bowed his head upon a hand and reflected
sagely that love was the very deuce.

He wondered if he could or ever would love or be loved so madly.

He rather hoped not ...

Here, if you please, was the scion of a reigning royal family risking as
pretty a scandal as one could well imagine--and all for love! Given a few
more days of life, and he would have jeopardized his right of succession
and set half-a-dozen European chancelleries by the ears--and all for love!
But for his untimely end, that poor, pretty creature would have joined her
life to his, consummating at one stroke her freedom from the intolerable
conditions of existence with Victor and a diplomatic conv