“You are afraid,” Maggie suggested, still with the laughter in her eyes, “that he will trifle with my affections?”

“Something like that,” he admitted bluntly.  “Prince Shan will be here for a week—­perhaps a fortnight.  When he goes, he goes a very long distance away.”

“I may decide to marry him,” Maggie said.  “One gets rather tired here of the regular St. George’s, Hanover Square, business, and all that comes afterwards.”

“Dear Lady Maggie,” Chalmers replied, “that is the trouble.  Prince Shan would never marry you.”

“Why not?” she asked simply.

“First of all,” Chalmers went on, after a moment’s hesitation, “because Prince Shan, broad-minded though he seems to be and is on all the great questions of the world, still preserves something of what we should call the superstition of his country and order.  I believe, in his own mind, he looks upon himself as being one of the few elect of the earth.  He travels, he is gracious everywhere, but though his manner is the perfection of form, in his heart he is still aloof.  He rides through the clouds from Asia, and he leaves always something of himself over there on the other side.  Let me tell you this, Lady Maggie.  I have never forgotten it.  He was at Harvard in my year, and so far as he unbent to any one, he sometimes unbent to me.  I asked him once whether he were ever going to marry.  He shook his head and sighed.  ‘I can never marry,’ he replied.  ‘Why not?’ I asked him.  ’Because there are no women of the Shan line alive,’ he answered.  Later, he took pity on my bewilderment.  He let me understand.  For two thousand years, no Shan has married, save one of his own line.  To ally himself with a princess of the royal house of England would be a mesalliance which would disturb his ancestors in their graves.  Of course, this sounds to us very ridiculous, but to him it isn’t.  It is part of the religion of his life.”

“You are not very encouraging, are you?” Maggie remarked.  “Perhaps he has changed since those days.”

Her companion shook his head.

“I should say not,” he replied, “the Prince is not of the order of those who change.”

“Is it matrimony alone,” she asked, “which he denies himself?”

Chalmers glanced towards Mrs. Bollington Smith, whose eyes were closed.  Then he nodded towards the stage.

“You see the woman who has just come upon the stage?”

Maggie glanced downwards.  A very wonderful little figure in white satin, lithe and sinuous as a cat, Chinese in the subtlety of her looks, European in her almost sinister over-civilisation, stood smiling blandly at the applauding audience.

“La Belle Nita,” Maggie murmured.  “I thought she was in Paris.  Well, what of her?”

“She is reputed to be a protegee of Prince Shan.  You see how she looks up at his box.”

Maggie was conscious of a queer and almost incomprehensible stab at the heart.  She answered without hesitation or change of expression, however.