“I’ll be darned, Ruggles, if I can guess what you asked her for!” “Well, it did turn out to be a pretty expensive party for you, Dannie, didn’t it?” Ruggles returned humorously. “I’ll let you off from any more supper parties.” And Dan fumed as he turned his back. “_Expensive!_ There you are again, Ruggles, with your infernal intrusion of money into everything I do.” When the older man found himself alone, he read a little and then put his book down to muse. And his meditations were on the tide of life and the beds it runs over; the living whirlpool as Ruggles himself had seen it coursing through London under fog and mist. It seemed now to surge up in the dark to his very windows, and the flow mysteriously passed under his windows in these silent hours when no one can see the muddy, muddy bottom over which the waters go. Out of the sound, as it flowed on, the cries rose, he thought, kindly to his ears: “God bless her—God bless Letty Lane!” And with this sound he closed his meditations, thinking of a more peaceful stream, the brighter, sweeter waters of the boy’s nature, translucent and clear. The vision was happier, and with it Ruggles rose and yawned, and shut his book. CHAPTER XII—THE GREEN KNIGHT The Duchess of Breakwater had made Dan promise at Osdene the day he went back to London that he would take her over to her own place, Stainer Court, and with her see the beauty, ruins and traditions of the place. When Dan got up well on in the morning, Ruggles had gone to the bank. Dan’s thoughts turned from everything to Letty Lane. With irritation he put her out of his mind. There had come up between himself and the girl he had known slightly in his own town years ago a wall of partition. Every time he saw her Poniotowsky was there, condescending, arrogant, rude and proud. The prince the night before had given the tips of his fingers to Dan, nodded to Ruggles as if the Westerner had been his tailor, and had appropriated Letty Lane, and she had gone away under his shadow. The simplicity of Dan’s life, his decent bringing up, his immaculate youth, for such it was, his aloofness from the world, made him naïve, but he was not dull. He waited—not like a skeptic who would fit every one into his pigeonholes—on the contrary, he waited to find every one as perfect as he knew they must be, and every time he tried to think of Letty Lane, Poniotowsky troubled him horribly and seemed to rise before him, and sardonically look at him through his eye-glass, making the boy’s belief in good things ridiculous.