of thing;' and, as Hyacinth did not succeed in swallowing at a gulp the contents of his big tumbler, he asked him presently whether he had heard anything from the Princess. Hyacinth replied that he could have no news except what the Captain might be good enough to give him; but he added that he did go to see her just before she left town.
'Ah, you did go to see her? That's quite right—quite right.'
'I went, because she very kindly wrote to me to come.'
'Ah, she wrote to you to come?' The Captain fixed Hyacinth for a moment with his curious colourless eyes. 'Do you know you are a devilish privileged mortal?'
'Certainly, I know that.' Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the bar-maid, who had heard this odd couple talking about a princess, was staring at him too, with her elbows on the counter.
'Do you know there are people who would give their heads that she should write to them to come?'
'I have no doubt of it whatever!' Hyacinth exclaimed, taking refuge in a laugh which did not sound as natural as he would have liked, and wondering whether his interlocutor were not precisely one of these people. In this case the bar-maid might well stare; for deeply convinced as our young man might be that he was the son of Lord Frederick Purvis, there was really no end to the oddity of his being preferred—and by a princess—to Captain Sholto. If anything could have reinforced, at that moment, his sense of this anomaly, it would have been the indescribably gentlemanly way, implying all sorts of common initiations, in which his companion went on.
'Ah, well, I see you know how to take it! And if you
