brass, applied to a hundred uses and abuses, were as tumbled
together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the
loot of far-off victories. The young man's movements, however,
betrayed no consistency of attention--not even, for that matter,
when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces
shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned
hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of
parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias. And the
Prince's undirected thought was not a little symptomatic, since,
though the turn of the season had come and the flush of the
streets begun to fade, the possibilities of faces, on the August
afternoon, were still one of the notes of the scene. He was too
restless--that was the fact--for any concentration, and the last
idea that would just now have occurred to him in any connection
was the idea of pursuit.

He had been pursuing for six months as never in his life before,
and what had actually unsteadied him, as we join him, was the
sense of how he had been justified. Capture had crowned the
pursuit--or success, as he would otherwise have put it, had
rewarded virtue; whereby the consciousness of these things made
him, for the hour, rather serious than gay. A sobriety that might
have consorted with failure sat in his handsome face,
constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time oddly and,
as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blue
eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply
"foreign" to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to
be observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a
"refined" Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at
three o'clock, his fate had practically been sealed, and that