ly.

"He is so hard to teach," said Pollyooly plaintively. "You'd be
surprised. I keep telling him not to eat like a pig; and for about
four mouthfuls he doesn't. Then he forgets all about it; and I have to
begin all over again."

The guilty flush deepened in the cheeks of the prince.

"You must give it time to sink in. He's not used to learning things;
he has been so neglected," said the Honourable John Ruffin with a
hospitable desire to make things easier for her royal guest.

Pollyooly shook her head doubtfully, and frowned sadly upon the prince.

"It would take weeks and weeks; and I don't really ever see him at
meals," she said.

"Never mind: do what you can when you get the chance," said the
Honourable John Ruffin in a heartening tone.

"That's what I must do," said Pollyooly; but there was no great
hopefulness in her voice.

Sadly she handed a plate of cake to Prince Adalbert. There was a
sudden gleam in his small, but Hohenzollern, eye, and in one swift
gesture he took, or rather, to be exact, grabbed a slice, and thrust a
corner of it into his mouth.

As Pollyooly had said, for the first four bites all was well; but the
next three were accompanied by a slushy noise such as arises in a
pigstye at mealtime.

"There! There it is again!" she cried in tones of the bitterest
protest. "Isn't it dreadful?"

The prince flushed a darker red and hushed the slushy accompaniment.

The Honourable John Ruffin looked sympathetically sad.

"I couldn't have believed that anybody could be so hard to teach a
little thing like that to," said Pollyooly mournfully.

The prince grunted.

"Yes. I know you try to do your best--you needn't tell me that," said
Pollyooly, who appeared to understand his syncopated Prussian. "But
what is the good of a best like that?"

The prince finished the slice of cake with only two more slushy sounds.
Pollyooly sighed once or twice; and tea came to an end.

They rose; and Pollyooly said with resolution:

"I see what I shall have to do. I shall have to look after his outdoor
manners only."

CHAPTER XVII

THE DUKE HAS AN IDEA

Pollyooly did not again entertain royalty. She kept firmly to her
resolve to superintend only the outdoor manners and behaviour of Prince
Adalbert. She would not have her feelings again harrowed by his
painfully exact rendering of the noises made by a sturdy, happy porker
over its trough. But out of doors he continued, for the rest of h