"Good morning, Niti; what is yours?" asked her father, looking at her with grave eyes and smiling lips.
"As it was yesterday, only rather more so. In his present incarnation, Prince Oscar Oscarovitch is, I should think, about as black-hearted a scoundrel as ever polluted the air that honest people breathe."
"I entirely agree with you. And now, believing that, do you still propose to trust yourself to his tender mercies on board his own yacht, surrounded, as you will be, by men who, no doubt, are his absolute slaves?"
"I trust myself to his tender mercies, Dad?" she replied, drawing herself up and throwing her head back a little; "you seem to have got hold of the thing by the wrong end, as Brenda would say. That is only what it will look like. The reality will be that he will blindly trust himself to my mercies—and I can assure you that he will find them anything but tender. No, dear, we shall accept His Highness's invitation to lunch, and then his offer of the hospitality of the yacht for the trip, which, by the way, I fancy will be more to the eastward than to the northward——"
"You mean, I suppose, Trelitz and Viborg?"
"Not Trelitz, I think, but Viborg almost certainly. That will be the end of the abduction as far as I can see from our present plane of existence."
"Really, Niti—well, well. Of course, I know that you will be perfectly safe: but what would our good friends on this plane, as you put it, the Van Huysmans, for instance, think if they could hear you talking so calmly to your own father about getting yourself abducted by a man whom you justly think to be one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels on earth! And, by the way, what is to become of me in the carrying out of this little scheme of yours? I hope you don't expect me to connive at the abduction of my own daughter. I have a certain amount of reputation to lose, you know."
"Oh, if His Highness is the clever villain that we know him to be, I think we may safely trust him to arrange for your temporary disappearance from the scene. And whatever he does it will be easy for you to play the part of the passive victim for the time being. He can't injure or kill you, for if it came to extremities you have the means of giving his people such a fright as would probably drive them out of their senses, just as I could if their master got troublesome. Really, from a certain point of view, the adventure will have a decidedly humorous aspect."
"With a very considerable leaven of tragedy."
"Yes, the tragedy will be a logical sequence of the comedy—and, as I said last night, it will be tragedy. And now suppose we go to breakfast. I have been up nearly two hours helping Jenny with the packing, and this lovely air has given me a raging appetite. There's a little more to do yet, and we shall have His Highness here before long to ask for our decision and take us off to the yacht."