That there once was a real Prince Rabomirski is beyond question. That he was Ottilie’s father may be taken for granted. But that the Princess Rabomirski had a right to bear the title many folk were scandalously prepared to deny. It is true that when the news of the prince’s death reached Monte Carlo, the princess, who was there at the time, showed various persons, on whose indiscretion she could rely, a holograph letter of condolence from the czar, and later unfolded to the amiable muddle-headed the intricacies of a lawsuit which she was instituting for the recovery of the estates in Poland; but her detractors roundly declared the holograph letter to be a forgery, and the lawsuit a fiction of her crafty brain. Princess, however, she continued to style herself in Cosmopolis, and princess she was styled by all and sundry, and little Ottilie Rabomirski was called the Princess Ottilie. Among the people who joined heart and soul with the detractors was young Vince Somerset. If there was one person whom he despised and hated more than Count Bernheim--of the holy Roman empire--it was the Princess Rabomirski. In his eyes she was everything that a princess, a lady, a woman and a mother should not be. She dressed ten years younger than was seemly; she spoke English like a barmaid, and French like a cocotte; she gambled her way through Europe from year’s end to year’s end, and, after neglecting Ottilie for twenty years, she was about to marry her to Bernheim. The last was the unforgivable offense. The young man walked up and down the Casino terrace of Illerville-sur-Mer, and poured into a friend’s ear his flaming indignation. He was nine-and-twenty, and, though he pursued the unpoetical avocation of sub-editing the foreign telegrams on a London daily newspaper, retained some of the vehemence of undergraduate days when he had chosen the career--now abandoned--of poet, artist, dramatist and irreconcilable politician. “Look at them!” he cried, indicating a couple seated at a distant table beneath the awning of the café. “Did you ever see anything so horrible in your life? The maiden and the Minotaur. When I heard of the engagement today I wouldn’t believe it until she herself told me. She doesn’t know the man’s abomination. He’s a byword of reproach through Europe. The live air reeks with the scent he pours upon himself. There can be no turpitude under the sun in which the wretch doesn’t wallow. Do you know that he killed his first wife? Oh, I don’t mean that he cut her throat. That’s far too primitive for such a complex hound. There are other ways of murdering a woman, my dear Ross. You kick her body and break her heart and defile her soul. That’s what he did. And he has done it to other women.” “But, my dear man,” remarked Ross, elderly and cynical, “he is colossally rich.”