“No, no,” panted Philippa, “it’s the King. But Usk is quite right. It was silly of me to be so excited. Oh, please, Mr Mansfield, don’t go. I--I want you to hear how it was. Please stay here.” She caught his hand and held it, and Mansfield, before whose eyes had floated a vision in which his stick made closer acquaintance with King Michael’s sacred person than the monarch would be likely to consider agreeable, allowed himself to be persuaded to remain, more especially since Usk gave him a warning look behind Philippa’s back. “This is my affair. You have no right to interfere,” the look meant, and Mansfield was forced to submit. “I suppose they must have arranged it beforehand,” Philippa went on, “for you know, Usk, I was walking with Captain Roburoff. He talked so nicely about Uncle Cyril, and told me such interesting things about the Jews in Scythia, that I never thought about the path until he stopped suddenly, and said, ‘A thousand pardons, mademoiselle! What a fool I am! I have lost the way,’ and then I found that none of the others were in sight, and I could not hear their voices either. Captain Roburoff seemed dreadfully sorry, and asked me to sit down on a fallen tree while he went on a little farther to see where the path led to. I said I was not tired, but he persisted I must be, and I thought he would fancy that I was afraid to stay in the wood alone, so I sat down. He was out of sight among the trees almost at once, and it really was rather lonely, so that I was quite glad when I heard him coming back, as I thought. But it wasn’t Captain Roburoff at all, it was the King, and he said he had flown to the relief of the distressed damsel, and talked a lot of nonsense about wood-nymphs, and tried to pay me compliments about--about my hair, you know, and that sort of thing. I nearly laughed, but I thought it might be his way of being polite, so I walked on with him. Then we came to a rather steep place, and he would insist on helping me up it (though I believe I could have helped him much better), and he squeezed my hand. I pulled it away at once, and he said, in the most idiotic way, ‘Would that I might call that fair hand mine for ever!’ I thought that was going rather far, even for a foreigner, so I made some remark about Princess Lida, just to recall her to his mind. Then he flew out and said that he hated Princess Lida, that his mother and the Princess of Dardania had arranged the marriage when he was a baby, and had brought him up to look upon it as a settled thing, and that Princess Lida had no soul, and not a thought in common with him, and he was tired of her very name, and he would be graciously pleased to marry me instead. Fancy--a boy years younger than I am! He had got sentimental again by that time, but I was so angry that I gave him a good talking-to, and told him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and that Princess Lida was perfectly lovely, and would make him a far better queen than he had