“I didn’t know but you might have forgotten the Prince.” “No, I haven’t exactly forgotten him, but--I do think he might have written to me.” “Oh, that’s it, is it? Did he ask your permission to write?” “Good gracious, no. We never talked of writing. Old red sandstone, rather, was our topic of conversation. Still, he might have acknowledged receipt of the book.” “But the book was given to him in return for the one he presented to you.” “Yes, I suppose it was. I hadn’t thought of that.” “Then again, Kate, Russian notions regarding writing to young ladies may differ from ours, or he may have fallen overboard, or touched a live wire.” “Yes, there are many possibilities,” murmured Katherine dreamily. “It seems rather strange that Mr. Henderson should have time to come up here in the middle of the week.” “Why is it strange?” asked Katherine. “Mr. Henderson is not a clerk bound down to office hours. He’s an official high up in one of the big insurance companies, and gets a simply tremendous salary.” “Really? Does he talk as well as Jack Lamont did?” “He talks less like the Troy Technical Institute, and more like the ‘Home Journal’ than poor Prince Jack did, and then he has a much greater sense of humor. When I told him that the oath of an insurance man should be ‘bet your life!’ he laughed. Now, Jack would never have seen the point of that. Anyhow, the hour is too late, and I am too sleepy, to worry about young men, or jokes either. Good-night!” Next morning’s mail brought Dorothy a bulky letter decorated with English stamps. She locked the door, tore open the envelope, and found many sheets of thin paper bearing the heading of the Bluewater Club, Pall Mall. “I am reminded of an old adage,” she read, “to the effect that one should never cross a bridge before arriving at it. Since I bade good-by to you, up to this very evening, I have been plodding over a bridge that didn’t exist, much to my own discomfort. You were with me when I received the message ordering me home to England, and I don’t know whether or not I succeeded in suppressing all signs of my own perturbation, but we have in the Navy now a man who does not hesitate to overturn a court martial, and so I feared a re-opening of the Rock in the Baltic question, which might have meant the wrecking of my career. I had quite made up my mind, if the worst came to the worst, to go out West and become a cow-boy, but a passenger with whom I became acquainted on the ‘Enthusiana’ informed me, to my regret, that the cow-boy is largely a being of the past, to be met with only in the writings of Stewart Edward White, Owen Wister, and several other famous men whom he named. So you see, I went across the ocean tolerably depressed, finding my present occupation threatened, and my future uncertain.