“Well, Mrs Bedley, I mustn’t stand dawdling: I’ve to ’ave my ’air shampooed and waved for the Embassy party to-night you know!” And taking the little prince by the hand, the Royal Governess withdrew. V Among those attached to the Chedorlahomor expedition was a young--if thirty-five be young--eccentric Englishman from Wales, the Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith, a son of Lord Intriguer. Attached first to one thing and then another, without ever being attached to any, his life had been a gentle series of attachments all along. But this new attachment was surely something better than a temporary secretaryship to a minister, or “aiding” an ungrateful general, or waiting in through draughts (so affecting to the constitution) in the anterooms of hard-worked royalty, in the purlieus of Pall Mall. Secured by the courtesy of his ex-chief, Sir Somebody Something, an old varsity friend of his father, the billet of “surveyor and occasional help” to the Chedorlahomorian excavation party had been waywardly accepted by the Hon. ‘Eddy’ just as he had been upon the point of attaching himself, to the terror of his relatives and the amusement of his friends, to a monastery of the Jesuit Order, as a likely candidate for the cowl. Indeed he had already gone so far as to sit to an artist for his portrait in the habit of a monk, gazing ardently at what looked to be the Escurial itself, but in reality was nothing other than an “impression” from the kitchen garden of Intriguer Park. And now this sudden change, this call to the East instead. There had been no time, unfortunately, before setting out to sit again in the picturesque “sombrero” of an explorer, but a ready camera had performed miracles, and the relatives of the Hon. ‘Eddy’ were relieved to behold his smiling countenance in the illustrated-weeklies, pick in hand, or with one foot resting on his spade while examining a broken jar, with just below the various editors’ comments: _To join the Expedition to Chedorlahomor--the Hon. ‘Eddy’ Monteith, only son of Lord Intriguer_; or, _Off to Chedorlahomor!_ or, _Bon Voyage_...!