“And your Highness has fallen in love with her?” sniffed the man.
“Well, I might, Charles. One never knows.” And he took a “Petroff” from the big silver box, and lit it with care. “I am very lonely, you know.”
Charles’s lips relaxed into a smile, but he made no remark. He was well aware how confirmed was his master’s bachelordom. He often admired pretty girls, just as much as they adored him—because he was a prince—but his admiration was tinged with the acidity of sarcasm.
When Charles had gone, his Highness flung off his motor-coat and threw himself into a big chair to think. With a smart rat-a-plan, an infantry regiment of les braves Belges was crossing the Place to relieve the guard at the Palace. He rose and gazed across the square:
“Ah!” he laughed to himself, “my dear uncle, the Red Rubber King, is closely guarded, it seems! I suppose I ought to call upon him. He’s at home, judging from the royal standard. Whew! What a bore it is to have been born a prince! If I’d been a policeman or a pork-butcher I daresay I’d have had a much better time. The world never guesses how badly we fellows are handicapped. Men like myself cannot cross the road without some scoundrelly journalist working up a ‘royal scandal’ or a political complication.”
Then his thoughts ran off into another direction—the direction in which they had constantly flowed during the past week—towards a certain very charming, sweet-faced girl, scarcely out of her teens, who was staying with her father and mother at the Grand Hotel, down on the boulevard.
The Northovers were English—decidedly English. They were of that insular type who, in a Continental hotel, demand bacon and eggs for breakfast, denounce every dish as a “foreign mess,” and sigh for the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding of middle-class suburbia. James Northover, Charles had discovered to be a very estimable and trusted person, manager of the Stamford branch of the London and North Western Bank, who was now tasting the delights of Continental travel by three weeks’ vacation in Belgium. His wife was somewhat obese and rather strong-minded, while little Nellie was decidedly pretty, her light brown hair dressed low and secured by a big black velvet bow, a pair of grey, rather mischievous eyes, sweetly dimpled cheeks, and a perfect complexion. Not yet nineteen, she had only left the High School a year before, and was now being afforded an opportunity of inflicting her school-girl French upon all and sundry with whom she came into contact.
And it was French—French with those pronounced “ong” and “onny” endings for which the tourist-agents are so terribly responsible.
But with all her linguistical shortcomings little Nelly Northover, the slim-waisted school-miss with the tiny wisp of unruly hair straying across her brow, and the rather smart and intelligent chatter, had attracted him. Indeed, he could not get the thought of her out of his head.
They had met at a little inn at the village of Anseremme, on the Meuse, close to Dinant—that paradise of the cheap “hotel-included” tourist. Something had gone wrong with the clutch of his car, and he had been held up there for two days while an engineer had come out from Brussels to repair the damage. Being the only other guest in the place beside the eminently respectable bank manager and his wife and daughter, he lost no time in ingratiating himself with them, and more especially with the last-named.