The editor’s face brightened.
“Of course!” he exclaimed in cordial tones. “I will support you with all my heart. I will write up your mission in the Review, and I will give you as many introductions as you need. What is your name, again?”
“Sterling. Mr. Melchisadek Sterling.”
The philanthropist nodded and touched a bell on his table.
“I will give you a letter,” he said, as his secretary came in and seated herself at the typewriter, “to the noblest creature I have ever met, a woman of high birth and immense fortune who has devoted herself to the cause.”
And turning ’round in his chair he dictated to the attentive secretary:
“My dear Princess Y——”
It needed all that command over my features which it has taken me twenty years to acquire to conceal the emotion with which I heard this name. Less than half an hour had passed since I had warned Lord Bedale that the Princess would be the most formidable enemy in my path, and now, on the very threshold of my enterprise, her name confronted me like an omen.
I need not repeat the highly colored phrases in which the unsuspecting philanthropist commended me to this artful and formidable woman as a fellow-worker in the holy cause of human brotherhood.