"Your Royal Highness," said Belvane modestly, "must not be too dashing with us poor Euralians." For the fourth time Udo explained that he had come there to speak to her severely, and that Belvane seemed to have mistaken his purpose. "Oh, forgive me, Prince Udo," she begged. "I quite thought that you had come out to commune soul to soul with a fellow-lover of the beautiful." "N--no," said Udo; "not exactly." "Then what is it?" she cried, clasping her hands eagerly together. "I know it will be something exciting." Udo stood up. He felt that he could be more severe a little farther off. He moved a few yards away, and then turned round towards her, resting his elbow on the sundial. "Countess," he began sternly, "ten days ago, as I was starting on my journey hither, I was suddenly----" "Just a moment," said Belvane, whispering eagerly to herself rather than to him, and she jumped up with a cushion from the seat where she was sitting, and ran across and arranged it under his elbow. "He would have been _so_ uncomfortable," she murmured, and she hurried back to her seat again and sat down and gazed at him, with her elbows on her knees and her chin resting on her hands. "Now go on telling me," she said breathlessly. Udo opened his mouth with the obvious intention of obeying her, but no words came. He seemed to have lost the thread of his argument. He felt a perfect fool, stuck up there with his elbow on a cushion, just as if he were addressing a public meeting. He looked at his elbow as if he expected to find a glass of water there ready, and Belvane divined his look and made a movement as if she were about to get it for him. It would be just like her. He flung the cushion from him ("Oh, mind my roses," cried Belvane) and came down angrily to her. Belvane looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. "You--you--oh, _don't_ look like that!" "Like that?" said Belvane, looking like it again. "Don't _do_ it," shouted Udo, and he turned and kicked the cushion down the flagged path. "Stop it." Belvane stopped it. "Do you know," she said, "I'm rather frightened of you when you're angry with me." "I _am_ angry. Very, very angry. Excessively annoyed." "I thought you were," she sighed. "And you know very well why." She nodded her head at him. "It's my dreadful temper," she said. "I do such thoughtless things when I lose my temper." She sighed again and looked meekly at the ground. "Er, well, you shouldn't," said Udo weakly. "It was the slight to my sex that made me so angry. I couldn't bear to think that we women couldn't rule ourselves for such a short time, and that a man had to be called in to help us." She looked up at him shyly. "Of course I didn't know then what the man was going to be like. But now that I know----" Suddenly she held her arms out to him beseechingly.