’Didn’t I tell you he called at your house in London and travelled down with me this morning!’ said Eckart.

My father looked in the direction of the princes, but his face was for the moment no index.  They bowed to Janet, and began talking hurriedly in the triangle of road between her hotel, the pier, and the way to the villas:  passing on, and coming to a full halt, like men who are not reserving their minds.  My father stept out toward them.  He was met by Prince Ernest.  Hermann turned his back.

It being the hour of the appointment, I delivered Eckart over to Temple’s safe-keeping, and went up to Janet.  ‘Don’t be late, Harry,’ she said.

I asked her if she knew the object of the meeting appointed by my grandfather.

She answered impatiently, ‘Do get him away from the prince.’  And then:  ’I ought to tell you the princess is well, and so on—­pardon me just now:  Grandada is kept waiting, and I don’t like it.’

Her actual dislike was to see Prince Ernest in dialogue with my father, it seemed to me; and the manner of both, which was, one would have said, intimate, anything but the manner of adversaries.  Prince Ernest appeared to affect a pleasant humour; he twice, after shaking my father’s hand, stepped back to him, as if to renew some impression.  Their attitude declared them to be on the best of terms.  Janet withdrew her attentive eyes from observing them, and threw a world of meaning into her abstracted gaze at me.  My father’s advance put her to flight.

Yet she gave him the welcome of a high-bred young woman when he entered the drawing-room of my grandfather’s hotel-suite.  She was alone, and she obliged herself to accept conversation graciously.  He recommended her to try the German Baths for the squire’s gout, and evidently amused her with his specific probations for English persons designing to travel in company, that they should previously live together in a house with a collection of undisciplined chambermaids, a musical footman, and a mad cook:  to learn to accommodate their tempers.  ’I would add a touch of earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party know one another’s edges before starting.’  This was too far a shot of nonsense for Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or stupidity, or trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding.  ’I, for my part,’ said he, ’stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies himself a born and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and no dog with a turn for feeling himself pulled by the collar.  And that reminds me you are amateur of dogs.  Have you a Pomeranian boar-hound?’

‘No,’ said Janet; ‘I have never even seen one’

‘That high.’  My father raised his hand flat.

‘Bigger than our Newfoundlands!’

’Without exaggeration, big as a pony.  You will permit me to send you one, warranted to have passed his distemper, which can rarely be done for our human species, though here and there I venture to guarantee my man as well as my dog.’