at this crisis of the Boy's life, even his uncle was as powerless to
help as was Paul Verdayne, the Englishman.

"The Princess Elodie!" he grumbled. "Who the devil is this Princess
Elodie, anyway? Austrian blood has no particular charm for me! They
might at least have told me something a little more definite about the
woman they have picked out to be the mother of my children. A man
usually likes to look an animal over before he purchases!"

Known to London society as Monsieur Zalenska, the Prince had come up to
town with the Verdaynes, and was apparently enjoying to the utmost the
frivolities of London life.

At a fashionable garden party he sat alone, in a seclusion he had long
sought and had finally managed to secure, behind a hedge of hawthorn
where none but lovers, and men and women troubled as he was troubled,
cared to conceal themselves.

The letter, long-expected and dreaded, had finally crossed the continent
to his hand. It was only the written confirmation of the sentence Fate
had pronounced upon him, even as it had pronounced similar sentences
upon princes and potentates since the beginning of thrones and kingdoms.

While the Prince--or Paul Zalenska, as I will now call him--sat in his
brooding brown study, clutching the imperial letter tightly in his young
hand, his attention was arrested by the sound of voices on the other
side of the hawthorn hedge.

He listened idly, at first, to what seemed to be a one-sided
conversation, in a dull, emotionless feminine voice--a discourse on