He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find the prince in a dusty corner.  The windows were still shuttered, and he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight.  He could have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls, to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured a title.  But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted and torn.  He picked it up.  It was traced in indistinguishable characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the prince had shown them.  St. George put the paper in his pocket and questioned a group of boys in the passage.

“Yup,” shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, “he means de bloke wid de black block.  Aw, he lef’ early dis mornin’ wid ’s junk follerin.’  Dey’s two of ’em.  Wot’s he t’ink?  Dis ain’t no Nigger’s Rest.  Dis yere’s all Eyetalian.”

St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street.  It was not yet ten o’clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and for his life he could not have waited longer.  Perhaps it was not true at all; perhaps none of it had happened.  The McDougle Street part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth?  But as he sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.  The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time, and she had said “Until to-morrow.”

On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to her apartment.  He found the drawing-room in confusion—­the furniture covered with linen, the bric-a-brac gone, and three steamer trunks strapped and standing outside the door.  All of which mattered to him less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.

She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had been the day before.  She was dressed for walking and had on a sober little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.  She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that.  To complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.

“This is breakfast,” she told him; “won’t you have a cup of tea and a muffin?  Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist’s.”

For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.

“You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?” he asked, noting the little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.

“Really leaving,” she assented, “at noon to-day.  Mr. Frothingham sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great comfort to me.  The prince doesn’t know about her yet,” she added naively, “but he must take her.”