“You mean that the time is really coming when we shall lose you?” she asked suddenly.

“When my work is finished, I return home,” he answered.  “I fancy that it will not be very long now.”

“When you do leave England,” she asked after a moment’s pause, “do you go straight to Japan?”

He bowed.

“With the Continent I have finished,” he said.  “The cruiser which His Majesty has sent to fetch me waits even now at Southampton.”

“You speak of your work,” she remarked, “as though you had been collecting material for a book.”

He smiled.

“I have been busy collecting information in many ways,” he said,—­“trying to live your life and feel as you feel, trying to understand those things in your country, and in other countries too, which seem at first so strange to us who come from the other side of the East.”

“And the end of it all?” she asked.

His eyes gleamed for a moment with a light which she did not understand.  His smile was tolerant, even genial, but his face remained like the face of a sphinx.

“It is for the good of Japan I came,” he said, “for her good that I have stayed here so long.  At the same time it has been very pleasant.  I have met with great kindness.”

She leaned a little forward so as to look into his face.  The impassivity of his features was like a wall before her.

“After all,” she said, “I suppose it is a period of probation.  You are like a schoolboy already who is looking forward to his holidays.  You will be very happy when you return.”

“I shall be very happy indeed,” he admitted simply.  “Why not?  I am a true son of Japan, and, for every true son of his country, absence from her is as hard a thing to be borne as absence from one’s own family.”

Somerfield, who was sitting on her other side, insisted at last upon diverting her attention.

“Penelope,” he declared, lowering his voice a little, “it isn’t fair.  You never have a word to say to me when the Prince is here.”

She smiled.

“You must remember that he is going away very soon, Charlie,” she reminded him.

“Good job, too!” Somerfield muttered, sotto voce.

“And then,” Penelope continued, with the air of not having heard her companion’s last remark, “he possesses also a very great attraction.  He is absolutely unlike any other human being I ever met or heard of.”

Somerfield glanced across at his rival with lowering brows.

“I’ve nothing to say against the fellow,” he remarked, “except that it seems queer nowadays to run up against a man of his birth who is not a sportsman,—­in the sense of being fond of sport, I mean,” he corrected himself quickly.