The pent-up feelings of the prince escaped in a loud yell. He loosed his preceptor and pressed a hand to his stinging cheek. It was too much for the baron. He tore his hat from his head, flung it to earth, ground it into the earth with his heel, and flung his arms to heaven in one frenzied movement: "Ach Gott!" he cried to the unregarding sky. "Thad a liddle Eengleesh-she-devil-child should strike a Hohenzollern!" Moved by his emotion, Pollyooly looked at him in anxious surprise: "It's all right," she said in a soothing voice. "You don't know how to manage him. He'll go like a lamb." Her surmise (it could have been no more than a surmise) proved accurate. The prince went blubbering, but he went like a lamb. It might be supposed that his proud, Hohenzollern blood would have boiled for hours at the blow. Nothing of the kind. After a hearty lunch he rose and said firmly: "I'm going to blay wiz Bollyooly." He went. The baron followed him gloomily. Now he knew the cosmic all to be a mere time-honored cheat. In this order they came down on to the beach and approached a group of children in which Pollyooly reigned. The prince entered it with the air of an uninvited guest, very doubtful of his welcome, and said to Pollyooly in a tone half assertive, half beseeching: "I've coom to blay." Pollyooly looked at him with very stern eyes and said: "Well, you quite understand you've got to behave yourself." The baron groaned. Pollyooly turned to him and said with polite interest: "Has he kicked you again?" "Ach Himmel!" said the baron; and he thrust his hands into his pockets, clenched his fingers very tightly, and walked away with bowed head. CHAPTER XIV THE TRAINING OF ROYALTY On that day began the real instruction of Prince Adalbert of Lippe-Schweidnitz in the art of life and the graces of social intercourse. Pollyooly continued it with unswerving firmness. Her method of treating a Hohenzollern was indeed entirely subversive of all current ideas on the matter of the deference due to the members of a family which has practically made the history of Europe since the beginning of this century. It seemed at times as if to her a Hohenzollern was a hardly animate object which you shoved here and there as you might an easy-chair which kept catching in the carpet, or at other times a mere beast of burden which you shoved, or shook, or cuffed gently into doing what you wanted with a moderate, but uncertain, degree of precision. Often however a piercing shriek was sufficient to produce the required action. The prince was always in a perspiration, and often out of breath. But he seemed to thrive on the treatment: his appetite improved; his pastiness lessened; his skin grew clearer; and his flesh became less abundant and harder. He also became quicker in his movements, and showed many more glimmerings of intelligence, sometimes sustained for seconds at a time.