Godfrey had sent the cab on with his luggage, and let himself in by the garden gate. He arrived just in time to hear the end of the story. Reader and listener were close to the parlour door. As his name was spoken, Godfrey heard a little movement from within--the sound of the movement of a woman's skirts. His impressionable nature responded to a new appeal, his readily receptive eyes beheld a new vision. As he looked at the big man and his little girl, so happy in one another, so at peace yet never in tedium, he wished that it--his affair--could be neither on his terms nor on hers--could be neither a deceit nor a defiance, but could be the straight regular thing, the good old-fashioned thing that, after all, served most people's turn well enough. There were failures, but it was in the broad way of nature and broadly successful. Who really objected to it, or questioned it? To whom was the Institution obnoxious? Rips and cranks, he answered in his concise vernacular; really it did well enough for everybody else--with, no doubt, allowances made here and there. The soft rustle sounded again from within the parlour. Then Winnie Maxon stood in the doorway with shining, welcoming eyes. "Well, would you like the story of the Princess with the Broken Heart?" asked Alice. "Anything about a Princess!" said Stephen, with handsome liberality. "It sounds sad, Alice. If it's sad, don't let's have it," Winnie pleaded. "Oh, after all the old doctors had tried to mend it, one came, looking much older and much more wrinkled than all the rest----" "I shall keep my eye on that practitioner, all the same," Stephen interposed. "I'm beginning to know the ropes!" "And he mended it with an enormous gold ring that he'd cut off the little finger of a giant he had once killed on a walk he took." "What a fellow!" said Stephen. "Prince in disguise, Alice?" "Why, father, of course he was!" Stephen shook his big head and turned his big spectacles up to heaven. "And that fellow Dennehy dares to call himself a republican! Now who--who, I ask you--would give a fig for a President in disguise? Read me some more Princesses, Alice." They all enjoyed the Princesses. So sometimes, for an hour, a little child shall lead us into peace. CHAPTER VIII SUBVERSIVE Embedded in his own conceptions as in a rock, Cyril Maxon refused to believe that his wife would not soon "have had enough of it." He refused to accept the failure of the envoy through whose mouth he had been induced to make such great concessions and such generous promises. Could they, in the end, fail to move her?