“We were talking fairy tales,” he answered, “and they are not nonsense.  Do not you ever read the history of your country as it was many hundreds of years ago, before this ugly thing they call civilization weakened the sinews of our race and besmirched the very face of duty?  Do you not like to read of the times when life was simpler and more natural, and there was space for every man to live and grow and stretch out his hands to the skies,—­every man and every woman?  They call them, in your literature, the days of romance.  They existed, too, in my country.  It is not nonsense to imagine for a little time that the ages between have rolled away and that those days are with us?”

“No,” she answered, “it is not nonsense.  But if they were?”

He raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them.  The touch of his hand, the absolute delicacy of the salute itself, made it unlike any other caress she had ever known or imagined.

“The world might have been happier for both of us,” he whispered.

Somerfield, sullen and discontented, came and looked at them, moved away, and then hesitatingly returned.

“Willmott is waiting for you,” he said.  “The last was my dance, and this is his.”

She rose at once and turned to the Prince.

“I think that we should go back,” she said.  “Will you take me to my aunt?”

“If it must be so,” he answered.  “Tell me, Miss Penelope,” he added, “may I ask your aunt or the Duchess to bring you one day to my house to see my treasures?  I cannot say how long I shall remain in this country.  I would like you so much to come before I break up my little home.”

“Of course we will,” she answered.  “My aunt goes nowhere, but the Duchess will bring me, I am sure.  Ask her when I am there, and we can agree about the day.”

He leaned a little towards her.

“Tomorrow?” he whispered.

She nodded.  There were three engagements for the next day of which she took no heed.

“Tomorrow,” she said.  “Come and let us arrange it with the Duchess.”

Prince Maiyo left Devenham House to find the stars paling in the sky, and the light of an April dawn breaking through the black clouds eastwards.  He dismissed his electric brougham with a little wave of the hand, and turned to walk to his house in St. James’s Square.  As he walked, he bared his head.  After the long hours of artificially heated rooms, there was something particularly soothing about the fresh sweetness of the early spring morning.  There was something, it seemed to him, which reminded him, however faintly, of the mornings in his own land,—­the perfume of the flowers from the window-boxes, perhaps, the absence of that hideous roar of traffic, or the faint aromatic scent from the lime trees in the Park, heavy from recent rain.  It was the quietest hour of the twenty-four,—­the hour almost of dawn.  The night wayfarers had passed away, the great army of toilers as yet slumbered.  One sad-eyed woman stumbled against him as he walked slowly up Piccadilly.  He lifted his hat with an involuntary gesture, and her laugh changed into a sob.  He turned round, and emptied his pockets of silver into her hand, hurrying away quickly that his eyes might not dwell upon her face.