‘Is he quite against Harry?’ asked my aunt Dorothy.

’Dear aunty, he ’s a prince, and a proud man.  He will never in his lifetime consent to . . . to what you mean, without being hounded into it.  I haven’t the slightest idea whether anything will force him.  I know that the princess would have too much pride to submit, even to save her name.  But it ’s her name that ’s in danger.  Think of the scandal to a sovereign princess!  I know the signification of that now; I used to laugh at Harry’s “sovereign princess.”  She is one, and thorough! there is no one like her.  Don’t you understand, aunty, that the intrigue, plot—­I don’t choose to be nice upon terms—­may be perfectly successful, and do good to nobody.  The prince may be tricked; the princess, I am sure, will not.’

Janet’s affectation of an intimate and peculiar knowledge of the princess was a show of her character that I was accustomed to:  still, it was evident they had conversed much, and perhaps intimately.  I led her to tell me that the princess had expressed no views upon my father.  ’He does not come within her scope, Harry.’  ‘Scope’ was one of Janet’s new words, wherewith she would now and then fall to seasoning a serviceable but savourless outworn vocabulary of the common table.  In spite of that and other offences, rendered prominent to me by the lifting of her lip and her frown when she had to speak of my father, I was on her side, not on his.  Her estimation of the princess was soundly based.  She discerned exactly the nature of Ottilia’s entanglement, and her peril.

She and my aunt Dorothy passed the afternoon with Ottilia, while I crossed the head of the street, looking down at the one house, where the princess was virtually imprisoned, either by her father’s express injunction or her own discretion.  And it was as well that she should not be out.  The yachting season had brought many London men to the island.  I met several who had not forgotten the newspaper-paragraph assertions and contradictions.  Lord Alton, Admiral Loftus, and others were on the pier and in the outfitters’ shops, eager for gossip, as the languid stretch of indolence inclines men to be.  The Admiral asked me for the whereabout of Prince Ernest’s territory.  He too said that the prince would be free of the Club during his residence, adding: 

’Where is he?’—­not a question demanding an answer.  The men might have let the princess go by, but there would have been questions urgently demanding answers had she been seen by their women.

Late in the evening my father’s yacht was sighted from the pier.  Just as he reached his moorings, and his boat was hauled round, the last steamer came in.  Sharp-eyed Janet saw the squire on board among a crowd, and Temple next to him, supporting his arm.

‘Has grandada been ill?’ she exclaimed.

My chief concern was to see my father’s head rising in the midst of the crowd, uncovering repeatedly.  Prince Ernest and General Goodwin were behind him, stepping off the lower pier-platform.  The General did not look pleased.  My grandfather, with Janet holding his arm, in the place of Temple, stood waiting to see that his man had done his duty by the luggage.