But she did not look happy, and Kate, who loved her, realized the alteration far more keenly than Mr. Morehouse, though even he felt vaguely that something had gone wrong with the Princess di Sereno.  Kate, who knew well what a difference happiness could make in a woman’s health and looks, guessed that the loss of her mistress’s colour and spirits was connected with the disappearance of Hilliard.  A paragraph she had read in that exciting number of the Illustrated London News had, together with some vague hints unconsciously dropped by Angela and a few words of the banker’s overheard, set Kate’s wits to working, and thus she arrived, through sympathy, at something like the truth.  But Mr. Morehouse’s diagnosis of the case had in it no such romantic ingredient as hopeless love.

He alone in America (since Theo Dene was gone, and Kate merely suspected) knew that Mrs. May was the Princess di Sereno, who had never been a wife to Paolo di Sereno except in name.  He knew that the Princess had grievances, and that she had left her identity in the Old World in the wish to forget the past completely.  Knowing this, when a certain piece of news came his way he felt it his disagreeable duty to pass it on to Mrs. May.  And it was the very piece of news which had set Theo Dene wondering whether Angela “knew about the Prince.”

Most California journals are apt to give local matters of interest precedence over affairs at a distance, and so it was that (though Angela usually glanced through a newspaper every day or two during her travels) she had never come upon Paolo di Sereno’s name except in that old copy of the Illustrated London News.  There she learned how well he was amusing himself while Mrs. May saw California under Nick Hilliard’s guidance.  But after that came a blank.  She knew only that he and a somewhat notorious woman were making ascents together in an aeroplane.  But it remained for Mr. Morehouse to tell her of the sensation the pair were creating in Europe.

There was a woman—­indeed, there was invariably a woman, though not always the same—­whose flaunting friendship with the Prince had fixed Angela’s resolve to turn her back on the old life.  The woman had begun a career on the very humblest plane, had become an artist’s model, then had learned to sing and dance, and at length her reputation as a beauty had made her name famous.  A marquis had married her, and when his heart was broken and his money spent, had obligingly killed himself in an inconspicuous and gentlemanly manner.  After that his widow had achieved an even greater popular success, and had attracted the attention of Paolo di Sereno.

It was about this time that Angela left Rome, and what Theo Dene wondered if Mrs. May “knew about the Prince,” was his hope to break the record for distance in a new aeroplane.  Mr. Morehouse, who took one or two French and English illustrated weeklies as well as New York daily papers, saw these things as soon as Theo Dene saw them; and, when Angela returned to San Francisco from Bakersfield, he told her of the Prince’s project.