"Well, that's a good deal," said the Honourable John Ruffin in an encouraging tone. "And he is a little brighter too, though he does only grunt; and of course he behaves better; he doesn't knock the other children about like he used to." "Well, there you are," said the Honourable John Ruffin, in the tone of one completely satisfied. "Oh, but he is slow!" Pollyooly protested. "It would take weeks and weeks to really do anything with him--weeks and weeks." "But what can you expect?" said the Honourable John Ruffin amiably. "The red Deepings were notable people, ruling a county, and hacking and hewing the best people in four counties round, when the ancestors of the prince were swineherds in a Prussian forest. And those ancestors stayed in that forest for five hundred years after that. Prince Adalbert doesn't throw back more than a hundred and fifty years. If a red Deeping produced an Adalbert, he would throw back six hundred and fifty years; and it isn't done." "Yes," said Pollyooly politely, though she did not follow at all his abstruse dissertation. "So you see you needn't feel overpaid at all," he said. "No," said Pollyooly in the tone of one perfectly satisfied. "Besides, if you do, you can always put in a little more training." "Oh, yes: that was what I was meaning to do," she said. Now that Pollyooly had been approved, or rather enthusiastically welcomed, as the ideal companion of Prince Adalbert, the baron was all affability and winning smiles. He had indeed reason to be, for she made life much easier for him. Without a care he abandoned Prince Adalbert to her whenever she would have him, and sat reading or sleeping in his deck-chair on the sunny sands with a mind wholly at peace. With that approved guardian the prince must be safe. Thus it came about that he became Pollyooly's perpetual companion, or, to be exact, her perpetual hanger-on. He could not be said to afford companionship to her, for, like the Lump, he preferred the grunt to articulate speech. He played in all the games in which she played--at least, if they were not too difficult for his understanding. If they were, he watched her play them with the dogged attention of an enthusiast. As she came to know him better and better, it is to be feared that Pollyooly remembered his exalted station less and less. She quite forgot the prince in the boy. She sometimes deplored the fact to Mrs. Gibson that though Adalbert could now be trusted not to get into mischief by any act of will, he was so stupid that he needed a perpetual eye on him. The Honourable John Ruffin sometimes enquired about his progress in morals, manners, and intelligence; Pollyooly's report on it was always dispirited. But he was surprised, on returning home from Littlestone to tea one evening, to find Pollyooly entertaining royalty in the parlour of the flustered Mrs. Wilson.