"Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment, and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
"I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
St. George laughed.
"Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell any one else."
"'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect tranquillity.
St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away. Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid wonderment at crêpe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour gone astray.
St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of furniture remained.
He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls, to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and questioned a group of boys in the passage.