Читать книгу The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett - Compton Mackenzie - Страница 5

Table of Contents

THE amount of brandy that Henry Snow had drunk to support what he called his misfortune made him loquacious for the first part of the journey. While he and Sylvia waited during the night at a railway junction, he held forth at length not merely upon the event that was driving him out of France, but generally upon the whole course of his life. Sylvia was glad that her father treated her as if she were grown up, because having conceived for him a kind of maternal solicitude, not so much from pity or affection as from the inspiration to quit Lille forever which she gratefully owed to his lapse, she had no intention of letting him re-establish any authority over herself. His life’s history, poured forth while they paced the dark platform or huddled before the stove in the dim waiting-room, confirmed her resolve.

“Of course, when I first got that job in Lille it seemed just what I was looking for. I’d had a very scrappy education, because my father, who was cashier in a bank, died, and my mother, who you’re a bit like—I used to have a photograph of her, but I suppose it’s lost, like everything else—my mother got run over and killed coming back from the funeral. There’s something funny about that, you know. I remember your mother laughed very much when I told her about it once. But I didn’t laugh at the time, I can tell you, because it meant two aunts playing battledore and shuttlecock. Don’t interrupt, there’s a good girl. It’s a sort of game. I can’t remember what it is in French. I dare say it doesn’t exist in France. You’ll have to stick to English now. Good old England, it’s not a bad place. Well, these two aunts of mine grudged every penny they spent on me, but one of them got married to a man who knew the firm I worked for in Lille. That’s how I came to France. Where are my aunts now? Dead, I hope. Don’t you fret, Sylvia, we sha’n’t trouble any of our relations for a long time to come. Then after I’d been in France about four years I married your mother. If you ask me why, I can’t tell you. I loved her; but the thing was wrong somehow. It put me in a false position. Well, look at me! I’m only thirty-four now. Who’d think you were my daughter?

“And while we’re talking on serious subjects, let me give you a bit of advice. Keep off jealousy. Jealousy is hell; and your mother was jealous. Well—Frenchwomen are more jealous than Englishwomen. You can’t get over that fact. The scenes I’ve had with her. It was no good my pointing out that she was fourteen years older than me. Not a bit of good. It made her worse. That’s why I took to reading. I had to get away from her sometimes and shut myself up. That’s why I took to cards. And that’s where your mother was wrong. She’d rather I gambled away her money, because it’s no use to pretend that it wasn’t her money, than go and sit at a café and perhaps observe—mind you, simply observe—another woman. I used to drink a bit too much when we were first married, but it caused such rows that I gave that up. I remember I broke an umbrella once, and you’d really have thought there wasn’t another umbrella in the whole world. Why, that little drop of brandy I drank to-night has made me feel quite funny. I’m not used to it. But there was some excuse for drinking to-night. I’ve had runs of bad luck before, but anything like these last two months I’ve never had in my life. The consequence was I borrowed some of my salary in advance without consulting anybody. That’s where the manager had me this afternoon. He couldn’t see that it was merely borrowing. As a matter of fact, the sum wasn’t worth an argument; but he wasn’t content with that; he actually told me he was going to examine—well—you wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain to you. It would take a commercial training to understand what I’ve been doing. Anyway, I made up my mind to make a bolt for it. Now don’t run away with the notion that the police will be after me, because I very much hope they won’t. In fact, I don’t think they’ll do anything. But the whole affair gave me a shock and Valentine’s behavior upset me. You see, when your mother was alive if I’d had a bad week she used to help me out; but Valentine actually asked me for money. She accused me of all sorts of things which, luckily, you’re too young to understand; and I really didn’t like to refuse her when I’d got the money.

“Well, it’s been a lesson to me and I tell you I’ve missed your mother these last months. She was jealous; she was close; she had a tongue; but a finer woman never lived, and I’m proud of her. She used to wish you were a boy. Well, I don’t blame her. After all, she’d had six girls, and what use are they to anybody? None at all. They might as well not exist. Women go off and get married and take somebody else’s name, and it’s finished. There’s not one of your sisters that’s really stayed in the family. A selfish crowd, and the worst of the lot was Valentine. Yes, you ought to have been a boy. I’ll tell you what, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you were a boy for a bit. You see, in case the French police make inquiries, it would be just as well to throw them off the scent; and, another thing, it would be much easier for me till I find my feet again in London. Would you like to be a boy, Sylvia? There’s no reason against it that I can see, and plenty of reasons for it. Of course it means cutting off your hair, but they say that’s a very good thing for the hair once in a way. You’ll be more free, too, as a boy, and less of a responsibility. There’s no doubt a girl would be a big responsibility in London.”

“But could I be a boy?” Sylvia asked. “I’d like to be a boy if I could. And what should I be called?”

“Of course you could be a boy,” her father affirmed, enthusiastically. “You were always a bit of a garçon manqué, as the French say. I’ll buy you a Norfolk suit.”

Sylvia was not yet sufficiently unsexed not to want to know more about her proposed costume. Her father pledged his word that it would please her; his description of it recalled the dress that people in Lille put on to go shooting sparrows on Sunday.

“Un sporting?” Sylvia queried.

“That’s about it,” her father agreed. “If you had any scissors with you, I’d start right in now and cut your hair.”

Sylvia said she had scissors in her bag; and presently she and her father retired to the outer gloom of the junction, where, undisturbed by a single curious glance, Sylvia’s curls were swept away by the wind.

“I’ve not done it quite so neatly as I might,” said her father, examining the effect under a wavering gas-jet. “I’ll have you properly cropped to-morrow at a hairdresser’s.”

Sylvia felt cold and bare round the neck, but she welcomed the sensation as one of freedom. How remote Lille seemed already—utterly, gloriously far away! Now arose the problem of her name.

“The only boy’s name I can think of that’s anything like Sylvia is Silas, and that’s more Si than Sil. Wait a bit. What about Silvius? I’ve seen that name somewhere. Only, we’ll call you Sil for short.”

“Why was I ever called Sylvia?” she asked.

“It was a fancy of your mother’s. It comes in a song called ‘Plaisir d’amour.’ And your mother liked the English way of saying it. I’ve got it. Sylvester! Sylvester Snow! What do you want better than that?”

When the train approached Boulogne, Henry Snow gave up talking and began to juggle with the ten-centime piece; while they were walking along to the boat he looked about him furtively. Nobody stopped them, however; and with the kind of relief she had felt when she had brought her album safely over the frontier Sylvia saw the coast of France recede. There were many English people on the boat, and Sylvia watched them with such concentration that several elderly ladies at whom she stared in turn thought she was waiting for them to be sick, and irritably waved her away. The main impression of her fellow-travelers was their resemblance to the blind beggars that one saw sitting outside churches. She was tempted to drop a sou in one of the basins, but forbore, not feeling quite sure how such humor would appeal to the English. Presently she managed to engage in conversation an English girl of her own age, but she had not got far with the many questions she wanted to ask when her companion was whisked away and she heard a voice reproving her for talking to strange little girls. Sylvia decided that the strangeness of her appearance must be due to her short hair, and she longed for the complete transformation. Soon it began to rain; the shores of that mysterious land to which she actually belonged swam toward her. Her father came up from below, where, as he explained, he had been trying to sleep off the effects of a bad night. Indeed, he did not recover his usual jauntiness until they were in the train, traveling through country that seemed to Sylvia not very different from the country of France. Would London, after all, prove to be very different from Lille? Then slowly the compartment grew dark, and from time to time the train stopped.

“A fog,” said her father, and he explained to her the meaning of a London fog.

It grew darker and darker, with a yellowish-brown darkness that was unlike any obscurity she had ever known.

“Bit of luck,” said her father. “We sha’n’t be noticed in this. Phew! It is thick. We’d better go to some hotel close by for to-night. No good setting out to look for rooms in this.”

In the kitchen at Lille there had been a picture called “The Impenitent Sinner,” in which demons were seen dragging a dead man from his bed into flames and darkness; Sylvia pointed out its likeness to the present scene at Charing Cross. Outside the station it was even worse. There was a thunderous din; horses came suddenly out of the darkness; everybody seemed to be shouting; boys were running along with torches; it was impossible to breathe.

“Why did they build a city here?” she inquired.

At last they came to a house in a quieter street, where they walked up high, narrow stairs to their bedrooms.

The next morning her father took Sylvia’s measurements and told her not to get up before he came back. When she walked out beside him in a Norfolk suit nobody seemed to stare at her; when her hair had been properly cut by a barber and she could look at herself in a long glass, she plunged her hands into her trousers pockets and felt securely a boy.

While they were walking to a mysterious place called the Underground, her father asked if she had caught bronchitis, and he would scarcely accept her word that she was trying to practise whistling.

“Well, don’t do it when I’m inquiring about rooms or the people in the house may think it’s something infectious,” he advised. “And don’t forget your name’s Sylvester. Which reminds me it wouldn’t be a bad notion if I was to change my own name. There’s no sense in running one’s head into a noose, and if inquiries were made by the police it would be foolish to ram my name right down their throats. Henry Snow. What about Henry White? Better keep to the same initials. I’ve got it. Henry Scarlett. You couldn’t find anything more opposite to Snow than that.”

Thus Sylvia Snow became Sylvester Scarlett.

After a long search they took rooms with Mrs. Threadgould, a widow who with her two boys, Willie and Ernie, lived at 45 Pomona Terrace, Shepherd’s Bush. There were no other lodgers, for the house was small; and Henry Scarlett decided it was just the place in which to stay quietly for a while until the small sum of money he had brought with him from Lille was finished, when it would be necessary to look for work. Meanwhile he announced that he should study very carefully the advertisements in the daily papers, leaving everybody with the impression that reading advertisements was a most erudite business, a kind of scientific training that when the moment arrived would produce practical results.

Sylvia meanwhile was enjoined to amuse herself in the company of Mrs. Threadgould’s two boys, who were about her own age. It happened that at this time Willie Threadgould, the elder, was obsessed by secret societies, to which his brother Ernie and many other boys in the neighborhood had recently been initiated. Sylvia was regarded with suspicion by Willie until she was able to thrill him with the story of various criminal associations in France and so became his lieutenant in all enterprises. Most of the secret societies that had been rapidly formed by Willie and as rapidly dissolved had possessed a merely academic value; now with Sylvia’s advent they were given a practical intention. Secrecy for secrecy’s sake went out of fashion. Muffling the face in dusters, giving the sign and countersign, lurking at the corner of the road to meet another conspirator, were excellent decorations, but Sylvia pointed out that they led nowhere and produced nothing; to illustrate her theory she proposed a secret society for ringing other people’s bells. She put this forward as a kind of elementary exercise; but she urged that, when the neighborhood had realized the bell-ringing as something to which they were more continuously exposed than other neighborhoods, the moment would be ripe to form another secret society that should inflict a more serious nuisance. From the secret society that existed to be a nuisance would grow another secret society that existed to be a threat; and finally there seemed no reason why Willie Threadgould (Sylvia was still feminine enough to let Willie think it was Willie) should control Shepherd’s Bush and emulate the most remarkable brigands of history. In the end Sylvia’s imagination banished her from the ultimate power at which she aimed. The Secret Society for Ringing Other People’s Bells did its work so well that extra policemen were put on duty to cope with the nuisance and an inspector made a house-to-house visitation, which gave her father such a shock that he left Pomona Terrace the next day and took a room in Lillie Road, Fulham.

“We have been betrayed,” Sylvia assured Willie. “Do not forget to avenge my capture.”

Willie vowed he would let nothing interfere with his vengeance, not even if the traitor turned out to be his own brother Ernie.

Sylvia asked if he would kill him, and reminded Willie that it was a serious thing to betray a secret society when that society was doing something more than dressing up. Willie doubted if it would be possible to kill the culprit, but swore that he should prefer death to what should happen to him.

Sylvia was so much gratified by Willie’s severity that she led him into a corner, where, having exacted his silence with the most solemn oaths, she betrayed herself and the secret of her sex; then they embraced. When they parted forever next day, Sylvia felt that she had left behind her in Willie’s heart a romantic memory that would never fade.

Mrs. Meares, who kept the house in Lillie Road, was an Irishwoman whose husband had grown tired of her gentility and left her. She did not herself sum up her past so tersely as this, but Sylvia was sure that Mr. Meares had left her because he could no longer endure the stories about her royal descent. Perhaps he might have been able to endure his wife’s royal descent, because, after all, he had married into the family and might have extracted some pride out of that fact; but all her friends apparently came from kings and queens, too. Ireland, if Mrs. Meares was to be believed, consisted of one large poverty-stricken royal family, which must have cheapened the alliance for Mr. Meares. It was lucky that he was still alive, for otherwise Sylvia was sure that her father would have married their new landlady, such admiration did he always express for the manner in which she struggled against misfortune without losing her dignity. This, from what Sylvia could see, consisted of wearing silk skirts that trailed in the dust of her ill-kept house and of her fanning herself in an arm-chair however cold the weather. The only thing that stirred her to action was the necessity of averting an ill-omen. Thus, she would turn back on a flight of stairs rather than pass anybody descending; although ordinarily when she went up-stairs she used to sigh and hold her heart at every step. Sylvia remembered her mother’s scrupulous care of her house, even in the poorest days; she could not help contrasting her dignity with this Irish dignity that was content to see indefinite fried eggs on her table, cockroaches in the bedrooms, and her own placket always agape. Mrs. Meares used to say that she would never let any of her rooms to ladies, because ladies always fussed.

“Gentlemen are so much more considerate,” said Mrs. Meares.

Their willingness to be imposed upon made Sylvia contemptuous of the sex she had adopted, and she tried to spur her father to protest when his bed was still unmade at four o’clock in the afternoon.

“Why don’t you make it?” he suggested. “I don’t like to worry poor Mrs. Meares.”

Sylvia, however contemptuous of manhood, had no intention of relinquishing its privileges; she firmly declined to have anything to do with the making of beds.

The breakfast-room was placed below the level of the street. Here, in an atmosphere of cat-haunted upholstery and broken springs, of overcooked vegetables and dingy fires, yet withal of a kind of frowsy comfort, Sylvia sometimes met the other lodgers. One of them was Baron von Statten, a queer German, whom Sylvia could not make out at all, for he spoke English as if he had been taught by a maid-of-all-work with a bad cold, powdered his pink face, and wore three rings, yet was so poor that sometimes he stayed in bed for a week at a stretch, pending negotiations with his laundress. The last piece of information Sylvia obtained from Clara, the servant, who professed a great contempt for the baron. Mrs. Meares, on the other hand, derived much pride from his position in her house, which she pointed out was really that of an honored guest, since he owed now nearly seven weeks’ rent; she never failed to refer to him by his title with warm affection. Another lodger was a Welsh pianist called Morgan, who played the piano all day long and billiards for as much of the night as he could. He was a bad-tempered young man with long black hair and a great antipathy to the baron, whom he was always trying to insult; indeed, once at breakfast he actually poured a cup of coffee over him.

“Mr. Morgan!” Mrs. Meares had cried. “No Irishman would have done that.”

“No Irishman would ever do anything,” the pianist snapped, “if he could get somebody else to do it for him.”

Sylvia welcomed the assault, because the scalding coffee drove the baron to unbutton his waistcoat in a frenzy of discomfort and thereby confirmed Clara’s legend about the scarcity of his linen.

The third lodger was Mr. James Monkley, about whom Sylvia was undecided; sometimes she liked him very much, at other times she disliked him equally. He had curly red hair, finely cut red lips, a clear complexion, and an authoritative, determined manner, but his eyes, instead of being the pleasant blue they ought to have been in such a face, were of a shade of muddy green and never changed their expression. Sylvia once mentioned about Mr. Monkley’s eyes to Clara, who said they were like a fish.

“But Monkley’s not like a fish,” Sylvia argued.

“I don’t know what he’s like, I’m sure,” said Clara. “All I know is he gives any one the creeps something shocking whenever he stares, which he’s forever doing. Well, fine feathers don’t make a summer and he looks best who looks last, as they say.”

One reason for disliking Mr. Monkley was his intimacy with her father. Sylvia would not have objected to this if it had not meant long confabulations during which she was banished from the room and, what was worse, thrown into the society of Mrs. Meares, who always seemed to catch her when she was trying to make her way down-stairs to Clara.

“Come in and talk to me,” Mrs. Meares would say. “I’m just tidying up my bedroom. Ah, Sil, if God had not willed otherwise I should have had a boy just your age now. Poor little innocent!”

Sylvia knew too well this counterpart of hers and hated him as much in his baby’s grave as she might have done were he still her competitor in life.

“Ah, it’s a terrible thing to be left as I’ve been left, to be married and not married, to have been a mother and to have lost my child. And I was never intended for this life. My father kept horses. We had a carriage. But they say, ‘trust an Irishwoman to turn her hand to anything.’ And it’s true. There’s many people would wonder how I do it with only one maid. How’s your dear father? He seems comfortable. Ah, it’s a privilege to look after a gentleman like him. He seems to have led a most adventurous life. Most of his time spent abroad, he tells me. Well, travel gives an air to a man. Ah, now if one of the cats hasn’t been naughty just when I’d got my room really tidy! Will you tell Clara, if you are going down-stairs, to bring up a dustpan? I don’t mind asking you, for at your age I think you would be glad to wait on the ladies like a little gentleman. Sure, as your father said the other day, it’s a very good thing you’re in a lady’s house. That’s why the dear baron’s so content; and the poor man has much to try him, for his relations in Berlin have treated him abominably.”

Such speeches inflicted upon her because Monkley wanted to talk secrets with her father made her disapprove of Monkley. Nevertheless, she admired him in a way; he was the only person in the house who was not limp, except Mr. Morgan, the pianist; but he used to glare at her, when they occasionally met, and seemed to regard her as an unpleasant result of being late for breakfast, like a spot on the table-cloth made by a predecessor’s egg.

Monkley used to ask Sylvia sometimes about what she was going to do. Naturally he treated her future as a boy’s future, which took most of the interest out of the conversation; for Sylvia did not suppose that she would be able to remain a boy very much longer. The mortifying fact, too, was that she was not getting anything out of her transformation: for all the fun she was having, she might as well have stayed a girl. There had been a brief vista of liberty at Pomona Terrace; here, beyond going out to buy a paper or tobacco for her father, she spent most of her time in gossiping with Clara, which she could probably have done more profitably in petticoats.

Winter drew out to spring; to the confabulations between Jimmy Monkley and Henry Scarlett were now added absences from the house that lasted for a day or two at a time. These expeditions always began with the friends’ dressing up in pearl-buttoned overcoats very much cut in at the waist. Sylvia felt that such careful attention to externals augured the great secrecy and importance of the enterprise; remembering the effect of Willie Threadgould’s duster-shrouded countenance upon his fellow-conspirators, she postulated to herself that with the human race, particularly the male portion, dress was always the prelude to action. One morning after breakfast, when Monkley and her father had hurried off to catch a train, the baron said in his mincing voice:

“Off ra-c-cing again! They do enjoy themselves-s-s.”

She asked what racing meant, and the baron replied:

“Hors-s-se-ra-c-cing, of cour-se.”

Sylvia, being determined to arrive at the truth of this business, put the baron through a long interrogation, from which she managed to learn that the jockeys wore colored silk jackets and that in his prosperous days the baron had found the sport too exciting for his heart. After breakfast Sylvia took the subject with her into the kitchen, and tried to obtain fuller information from Clara, who, with the prospect of a long morning’s work, was disinclined to be communicative.

“What a boy you are for asking questions! Why don’t you ask your dad when he comes home, or that Monkley? As if I’d got time to talk about racing. I’ve got enough racing of my own to think about; but if it goes on much longer I shall race off out of it one of these days, and that’s a fact. You may take a pitcher to the well, but you can’t make it drink, as they say.”

Sylvia withdrew for a while, but later in the afternoon she approached Clara again.

“God bless the boy! He’s got racing on the brain,” the maid exclaimed. “I had a young man like that once, but I soon gave him the go-by. He was that stuffed up with halfpenny papers he couldn’t cuddle any one without crackling like an egg-shell. ‘Don’t carry on so, Clara,’ he said to me. ‘I had a winner to-day in the three-thirty.’ ‘Did you?’ I answered, very cool. ‘Well, you’ve got a loser now,’ and with that I walked off very dignified and left him. It’s the last straw, they say, that gives the camel the hump. And he properly gave me the hump. But I reckon, I do, that it’s mugs like him as keeps your dad and that Monkley so smart-looking. I reckon most of the racing they do is racing to see which can get some silly josser to give them his money first.”

Sylvia informed Clara that her father used to play cards for money in France.

“There you are. What did I tell you?” Clara went on. “Nap, they call it, but I reckon that there Monkley keeps wide enough awake. Oh, he’s an artful one, he is! Birds and feathers keep together, they say, and I reckon your dad’s cleverer than what he makes out to be.”

Sylvia produced in support of this idea her father’s habit of juggling with a penny.

“What did I tell you?” Clara exclaimed, triumphantly. “Take it from me, Sil, the two of them has a rare old time with this racing. I’ve got a friend, Maudie Tilt, who’s in service, and her brother started off to be a jockey, only he never got very far, because he got kicked on the head by a horse when he was sweeping out the stable, which was very aggravating for his relations, because he had a sister who died in a galloping consumption the same week. I reckon horses was very unlucky for them, I do.”

“My grandmother got run over coming back from my grandfather’s funeral,” Sylvia proclaimed.

“By the hearse?” Clara asked, awestruck.

Sylvia felt it would be well to make the most of her story, and replied without hesitation in the affirmative.

“Well, they say to meet an empty hearse means a pleasant surprise,” said Clara. “But I reckon your grandma didn’t think so. Here, I’ll tell you what, my next afternoon off I’ll take you round to see Maudie Tilt. She lives not far from where the Cedars ’bus stops.”

About a week after this conversation Clara, wearing balloon sleeves of last year’s fashion and with her hair banked up to support a monstrous hat, descended into the basement, whence she and Sylvia emerged into a fine April afternoon and hailed an omnibus.

“Mind you don’t get blown off the top, miss,” said the conductor, with a glance at Clara’s sleeves.

“No fear of that. I’ve grown a bit heavier since I saw your face,” Clara replied, climbing serenely to the top of the omnibus. “Two, as far as you go,” she said, handing twopence to the conductor when he came up for the fares.

“I could go a long way with you, miss,” he said, punching the tickets with a satisfied twinkle. “What a lovely hat!”

“Is it? Well, don’t start in trying to eat it because you’ve been used to green food all your life.”

“Your sister answers very sharp, doesn’t she, Tommy?” said the conductor to Sylvia.

After this display of raillery Sylvia felt it would be weak merely to point out that Clara was not a sister, so she remained silent.

The top of the omnibus was empty except for Clara and Sylvia; the conductor, whistling a cheerful tune, descended again.

“Saucy things,” Clara commented. “But there, you can’t blame them. It makes any one feel cheerful to be out in the open air like this.”

Maudie’s house in Castleford Road was soon reached after they left the omnibus. When they rang the area bell, Maudie herself opened the door.

“Oh, you did give me a turn!” she exclaimed. “I thought it was early for the milkman. You couldn’t have come at a better time, because they’ve both gone away. She’s been ill, and they’ll be away for a month. Cook’s gone for a holiday, and I’m all alone.”

Sylvia was presented formally to the hostess; and when, at Clara’s prompting, she had told the story of her grandmother’s death, conversation became easy. Maudie Tilt took them all over the house, and, though Clara said she should die of nervousness, insisted upon their having tea in the drawing-room.

“Supposing they come back,” Clara whispered. “Oh, lor’! Whatever’s that?”

Maudie told her not to be silly, and went on to boast that she did not care if they did come back, because she had made up her mind to give up domestic service and go on the stage.

“Fancy!” said Clara. “Whoever put that idea into your head?”

“Well, I started learning some of the songs they sing in the halls, and some friends of mine gave a party last January and I made quite a hit. I’ll sing you a song now, if you like.”

And Maudie, sitting down at the piano, accompanied herself with much effect in one of Miss Vesta Victoria’s songs.

“For goodness’ sake keep quiet, Maudie,” Clara begged. “You’ll have the neighbors coming ’round to see whatever’s the matter. You have got a cheek.”

Sylvia thoroughly enjoyed Maudie’s performance and thought she would have a great success. She liked Maudie’s smallness and neatness and glittering, dark eyes. Altogether it was a delightful afternoon, and she was sorry to go away.

“Come again,” cried Maudie, “before they come back, and we’ll have some more.”

“Oh, I did feel frightened!” Clara said, when she and Sylvia were hurrying to catch the omnibus back to Lillie Road. “I couldn’t enjoy it, not a bit. I felt as if I was in the bath and the door not bolted, though they do say stolen fruit is the sweetest.”

When she got home, Sylvia found that her father had returned also, and she held forth on the joys of Maudie Tilt’s house.

“Wants to go on the stage, does she?” said Monkley, who was in the room. “Well, you’d better introduce us and we’ll see what we can do. Eh, Harry?”

Sylvia approved of this suggestion and eagerly vouched for Maudie’s willingness.

“We’ll have a little supper-party,” said Monkley. “Sil can go round and tell her we’re coming.”

Sylvia blessed the persistency with which she had worried Clara on the subject of racing; otherwise, bisexual and solitary, she might have been moping in Lillie Road. She hoped that Maudie Tilt would not offer any objections to the proposed party, and determined to point out most persuasively the benefit of Monkley’s patronage, if she really meant to go on the stage. However, Maudie was not at all difficult to convince and showed herself as eager for the party as Sylvia herself. She was greatly impressed by her visitor’s experience of the stage, but reckoned that no boys should have pinched her legs or given her the broken masks.

“You ought to have punched into them,” she said. “Still, I dare say it wasn’t so easy for you, not being a girl. Boys are very nasty to one another, when they’d be as nice as anything to a girl.”

Sylvia was conscious of a faint feeling of contempt for Maudie’s judgment, and she wondered from what her illusions were derived.

Clara, when she heard of the proposed party, was dubious. She had no confidence in Monkley, and said so frankly.

“No one wants to go chasing after a servant-girl for nothing,” she declared. “Every cloud’s got a silver lining.”

“But what could he want to do wrong?” Sylvia asked.

“Ah, now you’re asking. But if I was Maudie Tilt I’d keep myself to myself.”

Clara snapped out the last remark and would say nothing more on the subject.

A few days later, under Sylvia’s guidance, James Monkley and Henry Scarlett sought Castleford Road. Maudie had put on a black silk dress, and with her hair done in what she called the French fashion she achieved a kind of Japanese piquancy.

“N’est-ce pas qu’elle a un chic?” Sylvia whispered to her father.

They had supper in the dining-room and made a good deal of noise over it, for Monkley had brought two bottles of champagne, and Maudie could not resist producing a bottle of cognac from her master’s cellar. When Monkley asked if everything were not kept under lock and key, Maudie told him that if they couldn’t trust her they could lump it; she could jolly soon find another place; and, any way, she intended to get on the stage somehow. After supper they went up-stairs to the drawing-room; and Maudie was going to sit down at the piano, when Monkley told her that he would accompany her, because he wanted to see how she danced. Maudie gave a most spirited performance, kicking up her legs and stamping until the ornaments on the mantelpiece rattled. Then Monkley showed Maudie where she could make improvements in her renderings, which surprised Sylvia very much, because she had never connected Monkley with anything like this.

“Quite an artist is Jimmy,” Henry Scarlett declared. Then he added in an undertone to Sylvia: “He’s a wonderful chap, you know. I’ve taken a rare fancy to him. Do anything. Sharp as a needle. I may as well say right out that he’s made all the difference to my life in London.”

Presently Monkley suggested that Maudie should show them over the house, and they went farther up-stairs to the principal bedroom, where the two men soused their heads with the various hair-washes left behind by the master of the house. Henry expressed a desire to have a bath, and retired with an enormous sponge and a box of bath-salts. Monkley began to flirt with Maudie; Sylvia, feeling that the evening was becoming rather dull, went down-stairs again to the drawing-room and tried to pass the time away with a stereoscope.

After that evening Monkley and Scarlett went often to see Maudie, but, much to Sylvia’s resentment, they never took her with them. When she grumbled about this to Clara, Clara told her that she was well out of it.

“Too many cooks drink up the soup, which means you’re one too many, my lad, and a rolling stone doesn’t let the grass grow under its feet, which means as that Monkley’s got some game on.”

Sylvia did not agree with Clara’s point of view; she still felt aggrieved by being left out of everything. Luckily, when life in Lillie Road was becoming utterly dull again, a baboon escaped from Earl’s Court Exhibition, climbed up the drain-pipe outside the house, and walked into Mrs. Meares’s bedroom; so that for some time after this she had palpitations whenever a bell rang. Mr. Morgan was very unkind about her adventure, for he declared that the baboon looked so much like an Irishman that she must have thought it was her husband come back; Mr. Morgan had been practising the Waldstein Sonata at the time, and had been irritated by the interruption of a wandering ape.

A fortnight after this there was a scene in the house that touched Sylvia more sharply, for Maudie Tilt arrived one morning and begged to speak with Mr. Monkley, who, being in the Scarletts’ room at the moment, looked suddenly at Sylvia’s father with a question in his eyes.

“I told you not to take them all,” Henry said.

“I’ll soon calm her down,” Monkley promised. “If you hadn’t insisted on taking those bottles of hair-wash she’d never have thought of looking to see if the other things were still there.”

Henry indicated his daughter with a gesture.

“Rot! The kid’s got to stand in on this,” Monkley said, with a laugh. “After all, it was he who introduced us. I’ll bring her up here to talk it out,” he added.

Presently he returned with Maudie, who had very red eyes and a frightened expression.

“Oh, Jimmy!” she burst out. “Whatever did you want to take that jewelry for? I only found out last night, and they’ll be home to-morrow. Whatever am I going to say?”

“Jewelry?” repeated Monkley, in a puzzled voice. “Harry took some hair-wash, if that’s what you mean.”

“Jewelry?” Henry murmured, taking the cue from his friend. “Was there any jewelry?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know nothing about it,” Maudie cried, dissolving into tears. “For the love of God give it to me, so as I can put it back. If you’re hard up, Jimmy, you can take what I saved for the stage; but give us back that jewelry.”

“If you act like that you’ll make your fortune as a professional,” Monkley sneered.

Maudie turned to Sylvia in desperation. “Sil,” she cried, “make them give it back. It’ll be the ruin of me. Why, it’s burglary! Oh, whatever shall I do?”

Maudie flung herself down on the bed and wept convulsively. Sylvia felt her heart beating fast, but she strung herself up to the encounter and faced Monkley.

“What’s the good of saying you haven’t got the jewelry,” she cried, “when you know you have? Give it to her or I’ll—I’ll go out into the middle of the road and shout at the top of my voice that there’s a snake in the house, and people will have to come in and look for it, because when they didn’t believe about the baboon in Mrs. Meares’s room the baboon was there all the time.”

She stopped and challenged Monkley with flashing eyes, head thrown back, and agitated breast.

“You oughtn’t to talk to a grown-up person like that, you know,” said her father.

Something unspeakably soft in his attitude infuriated Sylvia, and spinning round she flashed out at him:

“If you don’t make Monkley give back the things you stole I’ll tell everybody about you. I mean it. I’ll tell everybody.” She stamped her feet.

“That’s a daughter,” said Henry. “That’s the way they’re bringing them up nowadays—to turn round on their fathers.”

“A daughter?” Monkley echoed, with an odd look at his friend.

“I mean son,” said Henry, weakly. “Anyway, it’s all the same.”

Monkley seemed to pay no more attention to the slip, but went over to Maudie and began to coax her.

“Come on, Maudie, don’t turn away from a good pal. What if we did take a few things? They shouldn’t have left them behind. People deserve to lose things if they’re so careless.”

“That’s quite true,” Henry agreed, virtuously. “It’ll be a lesson to them.”

“Go back and pack up your things, my dear, and get out of the house. I’ll see you through. You shall take another name and go on the stage right away. What’s the good of crying over a few rings and bangles?”

But Maudie refused to be comforted. “Give them back to me. Give them back to me,” she moaned.

“Oh, all right,” Monkley said, suddenly. “But you’re no sport, Maudie. You’ve got the chance of your life and you’re turning it down. Well, don’t blame me if you find yourself still a slavey five years hence.”

Monkley went down-stairs and came back again in a minute or two with a parcel wrapped up in tissue-paper.

“You haven’t kept anything back?” Maudie asked, anxiously.

“My dear girl, you ought to know how many there were. Count them.”

“Would you like me to give you back the hair-wash?” Henry asked, indignantly.

Maudie rose to go away.

“You’re not angry with me, Jim?” she asked, pleadingly.

“Oh, get out!” he snapped.

Maudie turned pale and rushed from the room.

“Silly b——h,” Monkley said. “Well, it’s been a very instructive morning,” he added, fixing Sylvia with his green eyes and making her feel uncomfortable.

“Some people make a fuss about the least little thing,” Henry said. “There was just the same trouble when I pawned my wife’s jewelry. Coming round the corner to have one?” he inquired, looking at Monkley, who said he would join him presently and followed him out of the room.

When she was alone, Sylvia tried to put her emotions in order, without success. She had wished for excitement, but, now that it had arrived, she wished it had kept away from her. She was not so much shocked by the revelation of what her father and Monkley had done (though she resented their cowardly treatment of Maudie), as frightened by what might ultimately happen to her in their company. They might at any moment find themselves in prison, and if she were to be let out before the others, what would she do? She would be utterly alone and would starve; or, what seemed more likely, they would be arrested and she would remain in Lillie Road, waiting for news and perhaps compelled to earn her living by working for Mrs. Meares. At all costs she must be kept informed of what was going on. If her father tried to shut her out of his confidence, she would appeal to Monkley. Her meditation was interrupted by Monkley himself.

“So you’re a little girl,” he said, suddenly. “Fancy that.”

“What if I am?” challenged Sylvia, who saw no hope of successfully denying the accusation.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Monkley murmured. “It’s more fun, that’s all. But, look here, girl or boy, don’t let me ever have any more heroics from you. D’ye hear? Or, by God! I’ll—”

Sylvia felt that the only way of dealing with Monkley was to stand up to him from the first.

“Oh, shut up!” she broke in. “You can’t frighten me. Next time, perhaps you’ll tell me beforehand what you’re going to do, and then I’ll see if I’ll let you do it.”

He began to laugh. “You’ve got some pluck.”

“Why?”

“Why, to cheek me like that.”

“I’m not Maudie, you see,” Sylvia pointed out.

Presently a spasm of self-consciousness made her long to be once more in petticoats, and, grabbing wildly at her flying boyhood, she said how much she wanted to have adventures. Monkley promised she should have as many as she liked, and bade her farewell, saying that he was going to join her father in a saloon bar round the corner. Sylvia volunteered to accompany him, and after a momentary hesitation he agreed to take her. On the stairs they overtook the baron, very much dressed up, who, in answer to an inquiry from Monkley, informed them that he was going to lunch with the Emperor of Byzantium.

“Give my love to the Empress,” Monkley laughed.

“It’s-s nothing to laugh at,” the baron said, severely. “He lives in West Kensington.”

“Next door to the Pope, I suppose,” Monkley went on.

“You never will be serious, but I’ll take you there one afternoon, if you don’t believe me.”

The baron continued on his way down-stairs with a kind of mincing dignity, and Mrs. Meares came out of her bedroom.

“Isn’t it nice for the dear baron?” she purred. “He’s received some of his money from Berlin, and at last he can go and look up his old friends. He’s lunching with the Emperor to-day.”

“I hope he won’t drop his crown in the soup,” Monkley said.

“Ah, give over laughing, Mr. Monkley, for I like to think of the poor baron in the society to which he belongs. And he doesn’t forget his old friends. But there, after all, why would he, for, though I’m living in Lillie Road, I’ve got the real spirit of the past in my blood, and the idea of meeting the Emperor doesn’t elate me at all. It seems somehow as if I were used to meeting emperors.”

On the way to the public house Monkley held forth to Sylvia on the prevalence of human folly, and vowed that he would hold the baron to his promise and visit the Emperor himself.

“And take me with you?” Sylvia asked.

“You seem very keen on the new partnership,” he observed.

“I don’t want to be left out of things,” she explained. “Not out of anything. It makes me look stupid. Father treats me like a little girl; but it’s he who’s stupid, really.”

They had reached the public house, and Henry was taken aback by Sylvia’s arrival. She, for her part, was rather disappointed in the saloon bar. The words had conjured something much more sumptuous than this place that reminded her of a chemist’s shop.

“I don’t want the boy to start learning to drink,” Henry protested.

Monkley told him to give up the fiction of Sylvia’s boyhood with him, to which Henry replied that, though, as far as he knew, he had only been sitting here ten minutes, Jimmy and Sylvia seemed to have settled the whole world between them in that time.

“What’s more, if she’s going to remain a boy any longer, she’s got to have some new clothes,” Monkley announced.

Sylvia flushed with pleasure, recognizing that cooperative action of which preliminary dressing-up was the pledge.

“You see, I’ve promised to take her round with me to the Emperor of Byzantium.”

“I don’t know that pub,” said Henry. “Is it Walham Green way?”

Monkley told him about meeting the baron, and put forward his theory that people who were willing to be duped by the Emperor of Byzantium would be equally willing to be duped by other people, with much profit to the other people.

“Meaning you and me?” said Henry.

“Well, in this case I propose to leave you out of the first act,” Monkley said. “I’m going to have a look at the scene myself. There’s no one like you with the cards, Harry, but when it comes to the patter I think you’ll give me first.”

Presently, Sylvia was wearing Etons, at Monkley’s suggestion, and waiting in a dream of anticipation; the baron proclaimed that the Emperor would hold a reception on the first Thursday in June. When Monkley said he wanted young Sylvester to go with them, the baron looked doubtful; but Monkley remarked that he had seen the baron coming out of a certain house in Earl’s Court Road the other day, which seemed to agitate him and make him anxious for Sylvia to attend the reception.

Outside the very commonplace house in Stanmore Crescent, where the Emperor of Byzantium lived, Monkley told the baron that he did not wish anything said about Sylvester’s father. Did the baron understand? He wished a certain mystery to surround Sylvester. The baron after his adventure in Earl’s Court Road would appreciate the importance of secrecy.

“You are a regular devil, Monkley,” said von Statten, in his most mincing voice. Remembering the saloon bar, Sylvia had made up her mind not to be disappointed if the Emperor’s reception failed to be very exciting; yet on the whole she was rather impressed. To be sure, the entrance hall of 14 Stanmore Crescent was not very imperial; but a footman took their silk hats, and, though Monkley whispered that he was carrying them like flower-pots and was evidently the jobbing gardener from round the corner, Sylvia was agreeably awed, especially when they were invited to proceed to the antechamber.

“In other words, the dining-room,” said Monkley to the baron.

“Hush! Don’t you see the throne-room beyond?” the baron whispered.

Sure enough, opening out of the antechamber was a smaller room in which was a dais covered with purple cloth. On a high Venetian chair sat the Emperor, a young man with dark, bristling hair, in evening dress. Sylvia stood on tiptoe to get a better look at him; but there was such a crush in the entrance to the throne-room that she had to be content for the present with staring at the numerous courtiers and listening to Monkley’s whispered jokes, which the baron tried in vain to stop.

“I suppose where the young man with a head like a door-mat and a face like a scraper is sitting is where the Imperial family congregates after dinner. I’d like to see what’s under that purple cloth. Packing-cases, I’ll bet a quid.”

“Hush! hush! not so loud,” the baron implored. “Here’s Captain Grayrigg, the Emperor’s father.”

He pointed to a very small man with pouched eyes and a close-cropped pointed beard.

“Do you mean to tell me the Emperor hasn’t made his father a field-marshal? He ought to be ashamed of himself.”

“My dear man, Captain Grayrigg married the late Empress. He is nothing himself.”

“I suppose he has to knock the packing-cases together and pay for the ices.”

But the baron had pressed forward to meet Captain Grayrigg and did not answer. Presently he came back very officiously and beckoned to Monkley, whom he introduced.

“From New York City, Colonel,” said Monkley, with a quick glance at the baron.

Sylvia nearly laughed, because Jimmy was talking through his nose in the most extraordinary way.

“Ah! an American,” said Captain Grayrigg. “Then I expect this sort of thing strikes you as quite ridiculous.”

“Why, no, Colonel. Between ourselves I may as well tell you I’m over here myself on a job not unconnected with royalty.”

Monkley indicated Sylvia with a significant look.

“This little French boy who is called Master Sylvestre at present may be heard of later.”

Jimmy had accentuated her nationality. Sylvia, quick enough to see what he wanted her to do, replied in French.

A tall young man with an olive complexion and priestly gestures, standing close by, pricked up his ears at Monkley’s remark. When Captain Grayrigg had retired he came forward and introduced himself as the Prince de Condé.

Monkley seemed to be sizing up the prince; then abruptly with an air of great cordiality he took his arm.

“Say, Prince, let’s go and find an ice. I guess you’re the man I’ve been looking for ever since I landed in England.”

They moved off together to find refreshment. Sylvia was left in the antechamber, which was filled with a most extraordinary crowd of people. There were young men with very pink cheeks who all wore white roses or white carnations in their buttonholes; there was a battered-looking woman with a wreath of laurel in her hair who suddenly began to declaim in a wailful voice. Everybody said, “Hush,” and tried to avoid catching his neighbor’s eye. At first, Sylvia decided that the lady must be a lunatic whom people had to humor, because her remarks had nothing to do with the reception and were not even intelligible; then she decided that she was a ventriloquist who was imitating a cat. An old gentleman in kilts was standing near her, and Sylvia remembered that once in France she had seen somebody dressed like that, who had danced in a tent; this lent color to the theory of their both being entertainers. The old gentleman asked the baron if he had the Gaelic, and the baron said he had not; whereupon the old gentleman sniffed very loudly, which made Sylvia feel rather uncomfortable, because, though she had not eaten garlic, she had eaten onions for lunch. Presently the old gentleman moved away and she asked the baron when he was going to begin his dance; the baron told her that he was the chief of a great Scottish clan and that he always dressed like that. A clergyman with two black-and-white dogs under his arms was walking about and protesting in a high voice that he couldn’t shake hands; and a lady in a Grecian tunic, standing near Sylvia, tried to explain to her in French that the dogs were descended from King Charles I. Sylvia wanted to tell her she spoke English, because she was sure something had gone wrong with the explanation, owing to the lady’s French; but she did not like to do so after Jimmy’s deliberate insistence upon her nationality.

Presently a very fussy woman with a long, stringy neck, bulging eyes, and arched fingers came into the antechamber and wanted to know who had not yet been presented to the Emperor. Sylvia looked round for Jimmy, but he was nowhere to be seen, and, being determined not to go away without entering the throne-room, she said loudly:

“Moi, je n’ai pas encore vu l’empereur.”

“Oh, the little darling!” trilled the fussy woman. “Venez avec moi, je vous présenterai moi-même.”

“How beautifully Miss Widgett speaks French!” somebody murmured, when Sylvia was being led into the throne-room. “It’s such a gift.”

Sylvia was very much impressed by a large orange flag nailed to the wall above the Emperor’s throne.

“Le drapeau impériale de Byzance,” Miss Widgett said. “Voyez-vous l’aigle avec deux têtes. Il était fait pour sa majesté impériale par le Société du roi Charles I de West London.”

“King Charles again,” Sylvia thought.

“Il faut baiser la main,” Miss Widgett prompted. Sylvia followed out the suggestion; and the Emperor, to whom Miss Widgett had whispered a few words, said:

“Ah, vous êtes français,” and to Miss Widgett, “Who did you say he was?”

“I really don’t know. He came with Baron von Statten. Comment vous appelez-vous?” Miss Widgett asked, turning to Sylvia.

Sylvia answered that she was called Monsieur Sylvestre, and just then a most unusual squealing was heard in the antechamber.

“Mon dieu! qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” Sylvia cried.

“C’est le—comment dit-on bagpipes en Français? C’est le ‘baagpeep’ vous savez,” which left Sylvia as wise as she was before. However, as there was no general panic, she ceased to be frightened. Soon she saw Jimmy beckoning to her from the antechamber, and shortly afterward they left the reception, which had interested Sylvia very much, though she regretted that nobody had offered her an ice.

Monkley congratulated Sylvia upon her quickness in grasping that he had wanted her to pretend she was French, and by his praise roused in her the sense of ambition, which, though at present it was nothing more than a desire to please him personally, marked, nevertheless, a step forward in the development of her character; certainly from this moment the old fear of having no one to look after her began to diminish, and though she still viewed with pleasure the prospect of being alone, she began to have a faint conception of making herself indispensable, perceiving dimly the independence that would naturally follow. Meanwhile, however gratifying Monkley’s compliment, it could not compensate her for the ice she had not been given, and Sylvia made this so plain to him that he invited her into a confectioner’s shop on the way home and gave her a larger ice than any she had seen at the Emperor’s.

Ever since Sylvia had made friends with Jimmy Monkley, her father had adopted the attitude of being left out in the cold, which made him the worst kind of audience for an enthusiastic account of the reception. Mrs. Meares, though obviously condescending, was a more satisfactory listener, and she was able to explain to Sylvia some of the things that had puzzled her, among others the old gentleman’s remark about Gaelic.

“This keeping up of old customs and ceremonies in our degenerate days is most commendable,” said Mrs. Meares. “I wish I could be doing more in that line here, but Lillie Road does not lend itself to the antique and picturesque; Mr. Morgan, too, gets so impatient even if Clara only hums at her work that I don’t like to ask that Scotchman to come and play his bagpipes here, though I dare say he should be only too glad to do so for a shilling. No, my dear boy, I don’t mean the gentleman you met at the Emperor’s. There is a poor man who plays in the street round here from time to time and dances a sword dance. But the English have no idea of beauty or freedom. I remember last time I saw him the poor man was being moved on for obstructing the traffic.”

Clara put forward a theory that the reception had been a church treat. There had been a similar affair in her own parish once, in which the leading scholars of the Sunday-school classes had portrayed the kings and queens of England. She herself had been one of the little princes who were smothered in the Tower, and had worn a pair of her mother’s stockings. There had been trouble, she remembered, because the other little prince had been laced up so tightly that he was sick over the pillow that was wanted to stuff out the boy who was representing Henry VIII and could not be used at the last moment.

Sylvia assured her that nothing like this had taken place at the Emperor’s, but Clara remained unconvinced.

A week or two passed. The reception was almost forgotten, when one day Sylvia found the dark-complexioned young man with whom Monkley had made friends talking earnestly to him and her father.

“You understand,” he was saying. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t require money for my work. You must not look upon me as a pretender. I really am the only surviving descendant in the direct line of the famous Prince de Condé.”

“Of course,” Monkley answered. “I know you’re genuine enough. All you’ve got to do is to back—Well, here he is,” he added, turning round and pointing to Sylvia.

“I don’t think Sil looks much like a king,” Henry said, pensively. “Though I’m bound to say the only one I ever saw in real life was Leopold of Belgium.”

Sylvia began to think that Clara had been right, after all.

“What about the present King of Spain, then?” Monkley asked. “He isn’t much more than nine years old, if he’s as much. You don’t suppose he looks like a king, do you? On the Spanish stamps he looks more like an advertisement for Mellin’s food than anything else.”

“Naturally the de jure King of Spain, who until the present has been considered to be Don Carlos, is also the de jure King of France,” said the Prince de Condé.

“Don’t you start any of your games with kings of France,” Henry advised. “I know the French well and they won’t stand it. What does he want to be king of two places for? I should have thought Spain was enough for anybody.”

“The divine right of monarchs is something greater than mere geography,” the Prince answered, scornfully.

“All right. Have it your own way. You’re the authority here on kings. But don’t overdo it. That’s all I advise,” Henry said, finally. “I know everybody thinks I’m wrong nowadays,” he added, with a glance at Monkley and Sylvia. “But what about Condy’s Fluid?”

“What about it?” Monkley asked. “What do you want Condy’s for?”

“I don’t want it,” said Henry. “I simply passed the remark. Our friend here is the Prince de Condé. Well, I merely remark ‘What about Condy’s Fluid?’ I don’t want to start an argument, because, as I said, I’m always wrong nowadays, but I think if he wanted to be a prince he ought to have chosen a more recherché title, not gone routing about among patent medicines.”

The Prince de Condé looked inquiringly at Monkley.

“Don’t you bother about him, old chap. He’s gone off at the deep end.”

“I knew it,” Henry said. “I knew I should be wrong. That’s right, laugh away,” he added, bitterly, to Sylvia.

There followed a long explanation by the prince of Sylvia’s royal descent, which she could not understand at all. Monkley, however, seemed to be understanding it very well, so well that her father gave up being offended and loudly expressed his admiration for Jimmy’s grip of the subject.

“Now,” said Monkley, “the question is who are we going to touch?”

The prince asked if he had noticed at the reception a young man, a rather good-looking, fair young man with a white rose in his buttonhole. Monkley said that most of the young men he had seen in Stanmore Crescent would answer to that description, and the prince gave up trying to describe him except as the only son of a wealthy and distinguished painter—Sir Francis Hurndale. It seemed that young Godfrey Hurndale could always command the paternal purse; and the prince suggested that a letter should be sent to his father from the secretary of the de jure King of Spain and France, offering him the post of court painter on his accession. Monkley objected that a man who had made money out of painting would not be taken in by so transparent a fraud as that; and the prince explained that Sir Francis would only be amused, but that he would certainly pass the letter on to his son, who was an enthusiastic Legitimist; that the son would consult him, the Prince de Condé; and that afterward it lay with Monkley to make the most of the situation, bearing in mind that he, the prince, required a fair share of the profits in order to advance his great propaganda for a universal Platonic system of government.

“At present,” the prince proclaimed, becoming more and more sacerdotal as he spoke of his scheme—“at present I am a lay member of the Society of Jesus, which represents the Platonic tendency in modern thought. I am vowed to exterminate republicanism, anarchy, socialism, and to maintain the conservative instincts of humanity against—”

“Well, nobody’s going to quarrel with you about spending your own money,” Monkley interrupted.

“He can give it to the Salvation Army if he likes,” Henry agreed.

The discussion of the more practical aspects of the plan went on for several days. Ultimately it was decided to leave Lillie Road as a first step and take a small house in a suburb; to Sylvia’s great delight, for she was tired of the mustiness of Lillie Road, they moved to Rosemary Avenue, Streatham. It was a newly built house and it was all their own, with the Common at one end of the road, and, better still, a back garden. Sylvia had never lived where she had been able to walk out of her own door to her own patch of green; moreover she thoroughly enjoyed the game of being an exiled king that might be kidnapped by his foes at any moment. To be sure, there were disadvantages; for instance, she was not allowed to cultivate an acquaintanceship with the two freckled girls next door on their right, nor with the boy who had an air-gun on their left; but generally the game was amusing, especially when her father became the faithful old French servant, who had guarded her all these years, until Mr. James Monkley, the enthusiastic American amateur of genealogy, had discovered the little king hidden away in the old servant’s cottage. Henry objected to being ordered about by his own daughter, but his objections were overruled by Jimmy, and Sylvia gave him no rest.

“That damned Condé says he’s a lay Jesuit,” Henry grumbled. “But what am I? A lay figure. I suppose you wouldn’t like me to sleep in a kennel in the back yard?” he asked. “Another thing I can’t understand is why on earth you had to be an American, Jimmy.”

Monkley told Henry of his sudden impulse to be an American at the Emperor’s reception.

“Never give way to impulse,” Henry said. “You’re not a bit like an American. You’ll get a nasty growth in your nose or strain it or something. Americans may talk through the nose a bit; but you make a noise like a cat that’s had its tail shut in a door. It’s like living in a Punch and Judy show. It may not damage your nose, but it’s very bad for my ears, old man. It’s all very fine for me to be a French servant. I can speak French; though I don’t look like the servant part of it. But you can’t speak American, and if you go on trying much harder you very soon won’t be able to speak any language at all. I noticed to-day, when you started talking to the furniture fellow, he looked very uneasy. I think he thought he was sitting on a concertina.”

“Anyway, he cleared off without getting this month’s instalment,” Monkley said.

“Oh, it’s a very good voice to have when there are duns kicking around,” Henry said. “Or in a crowded railway carriage. But as a voice to live with, it’s rotten. However, don’t listen to me. My advice doesn’t count nowadays. Only,” and Henry paused impressively, “when people advise you to try linseed oil for your boots as soon as you start talking to them, then don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Notwithstanding Henry’s pessimism, Monkley continued to practise his American; day by day the task of imposing Sylvia on the world as the King of Spain and France was being carefully prepared, too carefully, it seemed to Sylvia, for so much talk beforehand was becoming tiresome. The long delay was chiefly due to Henry’s inability to keep in his head the numerous genealogical facts that were crammed down his throat by the Prince de Condé.

“I never was any good at history even when I was a boy,” Henry protested. “Never. And I was never good at working out cousins and aunts. I know I had two aunts, and hated them both.”