On this fifth anniversary he sat gazing unseeingly at the autumn rack, the Princess’s letter in his band, and letting his thoughts wander down the years.  He marvelled how valiantly the stars in their courses had fought for him.  Even against recognition his life was charmed.  Once, indeed, he met at the house in Portland Place a painter to whom he had posed.  The painter looked at him keenly.

“Surely we have met before?”

“We have,” said Paul with daring frankness.  “I remember it gratefully.  But if you would forget it I should be still more grateful.”

The painter shook hands with him and smiled.  “You may be sure I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”

As for Theatreland, the lower walks in the profession to which Paul had belonged do not cross the paths of high political society.  It lay behind him far and forgotten.  His position was secure.  Here and there an anxious mother may have been worried as to his precise antecedents; but Paul was too astute to give mothers over-much cause for anxiety. lie lived under the fascination of the Great Game.  When he came into his kingdom he could choose; not before.  His destiny was drawing him nearer and nearer to it, he thought, with slow and irresistible force.  In a few years there would be Parliament, office, power, the awaking from stupor of an England hypnotized by malign influences.  He saw himself at the table in the now familiar House of green benches, thundering out an Empire’s salvation.  If he thought more of the awakener than the awakening, it was because be was the same little Paul Kegworthy to whom the cornelian heart had brought the Vision Splendid in the scullery of the Bludston slum.  The cornelian heart still lay in his waistcoat pocket at the end of his watch chain.  He also held a real princess’s letter in his hand.

A tap at the door aroused him from his day-dream.

There entered a self-effacing young woman with pencil and notebook.  “Are you ready for me, sir?”

“Not quite.  Sit down for a minute, Miss Smithers.  Or, come up to the table if you don’t mind, and help me open these envelopes.”

Paul, you see, was a great man, who commanded the services of a shorthand typist.

To the mass of correspondence then opened and read he added that which he had brought in from Colonel and Miss Winwood.  From this he sorted the few letters which it would be necessary to answer in his own handwriting, and laid them aside; then taking the great bulk, he planted himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and, cigarette in mouth, dictated to the self-effacing young woman.  She took down his words with anxious humility, for she looked upon him as a god sphered on Olympian heights—­and what socially insecure young woman of lower-middle-class England could do otherwise in the presence of a torturingly beautiful youth, immaculately raimented, who commanded in the great house with a smile more royal and debonair