Chase learned more of the attractive Lady Agnes and her court before he left England.  Common report credited her with being dangerously pretty, scandalously unwise, eminently virtuous, distractingly adventurous in the search for pleasure, charmingly unscrupulous in her treatment of men’s hearts, but withal, sufficiently clever to dodge the consequences of her widespread though gentle iniquities.  He was quite prepared to admire her, and yet equally resolved to avoid her.  Something told him that he was not of the age and valor of St. Anthony.  He went out to Japat with a stern resolution to lead himself not into temptation; to steer clear of the highway of roses and stick close to the thorny paths below.  Besides, he felt that he deserved some sort of punishment for looking so high in the Duchy of Rapp-Thorberg.

Not that he was in love with the proud Princess Genevra; he denied that to himself a hundred times a day as he sat in his bungalow and smoked the situation over.

He had proved to himself, quite beyond a doubt, that he was not in love, when, like a bolt from a clear sky, she stepped out of the oblivion into which he had cast her, to smile upon him without warning.  It was most unfair.  Her smile had been one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the effort to return a fair and final verdict.

As he sat in the shade of his bungalow porch on the afternoon of her arrival, he lamented that every argument he had presented in the cause of common sense had been knocked into a cocked hat by that electric smile.  Could anything be more miraculous than that she should come to the unheard-of island of Japat—­unless, possibly, that he should be there when she came?  She was there for him to look upon and love and lose, just as he had dreamed all these months.  It mattered little that she was now the wife of Prince Karl of Brabetz; to him she was still the Princess Genevra of Rapp-Thorberg.

If he had ever hoped that she might be more to him than an unattainable divinity, he was not fool enough to imagine that such a hope could be realised.  She was a princess royal, he the slave who stood afar off and worshipped beyond the barrier of her disdain.  In his leather pocketbook lay the ever-present reminder that she could be no more than a dream to him.  It was the clipping from a Paris newspaper, announcing that the Princess Genevra was to wed Prince Karl during the Christmas holidays.

He had seen the Christmas holidays come and go with the certain knowledge in his heart that they had given her to Brabetz as the most glorious present that man had ever received.  If he was tormented by this thought at the happiest season of the year, his crustiness was attributed by others to the loneliness of his life on the island.  If he grew leaner and more morose, no one knew that it was due to the passing of a woman.