If all of Jack's friends had been doing their level best to force her into the championship of Captain Madden, they could hardly have arranged a better method. She slipped her arm through the older man's at this moment in a very pretty fashion and together they led the way back to the ball room.
It was now a good deal past midnight and Ruth decided that the time had come for saying farewell. Jean was dancing with Giovanni Colonna and Frieda with Leon. But in a few moments they were persuaded to stop, and the Ranch party found the Princess Colonna, to say good-night.
The Princess had appeared at her ball in the character of Atalanta, the maiden who could run more swiftly than any man in the world. To all her suitors she had imposed the condition that she should be the prize of the man who could conquer her in a race, and had been finally won by the youth who dropped the golden apples at her feet, which she stooped to pick up.
Jean's Princess wore a crimson robe and around her yellow hair a wreath of golden laurel leaves. In her hand she carried a golden apple.
Yet in spite of the magnificence of the scene about her, she excused herself from her guests and went with the Ranch girls to Jean's room. Jean was going home tonight with her family.
Quite like another girl, who was neither a Princess nor yet a mythological character, the Princess Colonna kissed Jean good-by.
"I do wish you could let one of your girls stay with me always," she said, when she and Ruth were parting. "I think I am often homesick for America and the old life in the west which I led as a child. Jean has made me feel almost young again."
And though Ruth and the four girls laughed at the suggestion of the Princess' needing to feel young, each one of them noticed that when one studied her face closely there were lines about her mouth and eyes.
On the way home, the five women crowded into one carriage, Jean turned to her chaperon: "I know it isn't good taste to talk about people, Ruth dear, when one has been visiting them, so please don't reproach me. But I could not help seeing while I was the Princess' guest that, without knowing it, she has been a kind of Atalanta. Only in the race for happiness the golden apple she stopped to pick up was not money. She had wealth enough, but it was a title and a great position. The Prince may be very nice. I did not learn to know him very well, but certainly he seemed more like his wife's father than her husband. How can a girl ever marry a man twice as old as she is?"