A prince of the North, after being affianced as a child to a princess of the South, has fallen in love with her portrait and a lock of her hair.  When, however, the embassy appears to fetch home the bride, she sends back the message that she is not disposed to be married.  Upon receipt of this word the Prince and two friends, Florian and Cyril, steal away to seek the Princess, and learn on reaching her father’s court that she has established a Woman’s College on a distant estate.  Having got letters authorizing them to visit the Princess, they ride into her domain, where they determine to go dressed like girls and apply for admission as students in the College.  They arrive in disguise, and are admitted.  On the first day the young men enroll themselves as students of Lady Psyche, who recognizes Florian as her brother and agrees not to expose them, since—­by a law of the College inscribed above the gates, which darkness has kept them from seeing—­the penalty of their discovery would be death.  Melissa, a student, overhears them, and is bound over to keep the secret.  Lady Blanche, mother of Melissa and rival to Lady Psyche, also learns of the alarming invasion, and remains silent for sinister reasons of her own.  On the second day the principal personages picnic in a wood.  At dinner Cyril sings a song that is better fit for the smoking room than for the ears of ladies; the Prince, in his anger, betrays his sex by a too masculine reproof; and dire confusion is the result.  The Princess in her flight falls into the river, from which she is rescued by the Prince.  Cyril and Lady Psyche escape together, but the Prince and Florian are brought before the Princess.  At this important moment despatches are brought from her father saying that the Prince’s father has surrounded her palace with soldiers, taken him prisoner, and holds him as a hostage.  The Prince, after pleading to deaf ears, is sent away at dawn with Florian, and goes with him to the camp.  Meantime during the night, the Princess’s three brothers have come to her aid with an army.  An agreement is reached to decide the case and end the war by a tournament between the brothers, with fifty men, on one side; the Prince and his two friends, with fifty men, on the other.  This happens on the third day.  The Prince and his men are vanquished, and he himself is badly wounded.

But the Princess is now gradually to discover that she has “overthrown more than her enemy,”—­that she has defeated yet saved herself.  She has said of Lady Psyche’s little child:—­

“I took it for an hour in mine own bed
This morning:  there the tender orphan hands
Felt at my heart, and seem’d to charm from thence
The wrath I nursed against the world.”

When Cyril pleads with her to give the child back to its mother, she kisses it and feels that “her heart is barren.”  When she passes near the wounded Prince, and is shown by his father—­his beard wet with his son’s blood—­her hair and picture on her lover’s heart,