“You’ve fold me either too much or too little.  Am I not entitled to know how things stand?”

“You’re entitled to know the innermost secrets of my heart,” he cried; and he told thereof as far as his love for the Princess was concerned.

“But, my poor boy,” said Ursula tenderly, “how is it all going to end?”

“It’s never going to end,” cried Paul.

Ursula Winwood smiled on him and sighed a little; for she remembered the gallant young fellow who had been killed in the Soudan in eighteen eighty-five.

CHAPTER XV

It would never end.  Why should it?  Could a Great Wonder be merely a transient thrill?  Absurd.  Dawn followed night, day after day, and the wonder had not faded.  It would never fade.  Letter followed letter, each more precious than the last.

She began with “Mon cher Paul.”  Then “Mon cher,” then sometimes “Paul.”  She set the tone of the frank and loyal friendship in a style very graceful, very elusive, a word of tenderness melting away in a laugh; she took the friendship, pulled it to pieces and reconstructed it in ideal form; then she tied blue ribbon round its neck, and showed him how beautiful it was.  She sat on the veranda of her villa and looked’ out on the moonlit Mediterranean and wanted to cry—­“J’avais enbie de Pleurer”—­because she was all alone, having entertained at dinner a heap of dull and ugly people.  She had spent a day on the yacht of a Russiarr Grand-Duke.  “Il m’a fait une cour effrenee”—­Paul thirsted immediately for the blood of this Grand-Duke, who had dared to make violent love to her.  But when, a few lines farther on, he found that she had guessed his jealousy and laughed at it, he laughed too.  “Don’t be afraid.  I have had enough of these people.”  She wanted une ame sincere et candide; and Paul laid the flattering unction to his own sincere and candid soul.  Then she spoke prettily of his career.  He was to be the flambeau eveilleur, the awakening torch in the darkness before the daybreak.  But he musn’t overwork.  His health was precious.  There was a blot and erasure in the sentence.  He took the letter to the light, lover-wise, and looked at it through a magnifying glass—­and his pulses thrilled when it told him that she had originally written, “Votre sante m’est precieuse,” and had scrabbled out the “m.”  “Your health is precious to me.”  That is what her heart had said.  Did lover ever have a dearer mistress?  He kissed the blot, and the thick French ink coming off on his lips was nectar.

And he began his letters with “My dear Princess;” then it was “Dearest Princess;” then “My Princess.”  Then she rallied him on the matter.  It came to “Mais enfin j’ai un petit nom comme tout le monde.”  In common with the rest of humanity she had a Christian name—­and she was accustomed to be called by it by her frank and loyal friends.  “And they are so few.”  Paul heard the delicate little sigh and saw the delicate