“By all means then,” St. George assented heartily, “I would care immensely.  Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy.  Will you mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to show up without fail at my place at noon to-day?  And to wait there for me.”

Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page.  He was humming a weary little tune to the effect that “Billy Enny took a penny but now he hadn’t many—­Lookie They!” with which he whiled away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the “Lookie They!” until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet which he never got.

“Cawthorne,” said St. George, “it may be that I’m leaving to-night on the yacht for an island out in the southeast.  And the chief says that you and Amory are to go along.  Can you go?”

Little Cawthorne’s blue eyes met St. George’s steadily for a moment, and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.

“I can get the page done in an hour,” he promised, “and I can pack my thirty cents in ten minutes.  Will that do?”

St. George laughed.

“Ah, well now, this goes,” he said.  “Ask Chillingworth.  Don’t tell any one else.”

“‘Billy Enny took a penny,’” hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect tranquillity.

St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house.  A thousand doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.  Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.

The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early morning.  St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy.  For only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid wonderment at crepe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed woman to their neighbourhood.  The prince might have lived in McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour gone astray.

St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted him to such revelation.  There was no answer, and a repeated summons brought no sound from within.  At length he tentatively touched the latch.  The door opened.  The room was quite empty.  No remnant of furniture remained.