“I fancy,” she murmured, “that the person you are speaking of would not look at it in quite the same light.”
“Has any one seen the evening paper?” the Duchess asked. “It is there any more news about that extraordinary murder?”
“Nothing fresh in the early editions,” Sir Charles answered.
“I think,” the Duchess declared, “that it is perfectly scandalous. Our police system must be in a disgraceful state. Tell me, Prince,—could anything like that happen in your country?”
“Without doubt,” the Prince answered, “life moves very much in the East as with you here. Only with us,” he added a little thoughtfully, “there is a difference, a difference of which one is reminded at a time like this, when one reads your newspapers and hears the conversation of one’s friends.”
“Tell us what you mean?” Penelope asked quickly.
He looked at her as one might have looked at a child,—kindly, even tolerantly. He was scarcely so tall as she was, and Penelope’s attitude towards him was marked all the time with a certain frigidity. Yet he spoke to her with the quiet, courteous confidence of the philosopher who unbends to talk to a child.
“In this country,” he said, “you place so high a value upon the gift of life. Nothing moves you so greatly as the killing of one man by another, or the death of a person whom you know.”
“There is no tragedy in the world so great!” Penelope declared.
The Prince shrugged his shoulders very slightly.