The Northovers were English--decidedly English. They were of that insular type who, in a Continental hotel, demand bacon and eggs for breakfast, denounce every dish as a "foreign mess," and sigh for the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding of middle-class suburbia. James Northover, Charles had discovered to be a very estimable and trusted person, manager of the Stamford branch of the London and North Western Bank, who was now tasting the delights of Continental travel by three weeks' vacation in Belgium. His wife was somewhat obese and rather strong-minded, while little Nellie was decidedly pretty, her light brown hair dressed low and secured by a big black velvet bow, a pair of grey, rather mischievous eyes, sweetly dimpled cheeks, and a perfect complexion. Not yet nineteen, she had only left the High School a year before, and was now being afforded an opportunity of inflicting her school-girl French upon all and sundry with whom she came into contact. And it was French--French with those pronounced "ong" and "onny" endings for which the tourist-agents are so terribly responsible. But with all her linguistical shortcomings little Nelly Northover, the slim-waisted school-miss with the tiny wisp of unruly hair straying across her brow, and the rather smart and intelligent chatter, had attracted him. Indeed, he could not get the thought of her out of his head. They had met at a little inn at the village of Anseremme, on the Meuse, close to Dinant--that paradise of the cheap "hotel-included" tourist. Something had gone wrong with the clutch of his car, and he had been held up there for two days while an engineer had come out from Brussels to repair the damage. Being the only other guest in the place beside the eminently respectable bank manager and his wife and daughter, he lost no time in ingratiating himself with them, and more especially with the last-named. Though he spoke English perfectly and with but the very slightest accent, he had given his name at the inn as Herr Birkenfeld, for was not that one of his names? He was Count of Birkenfeld, and seigneur of a dozen other places, in addition to being Prince of the royal house of Hesse-Holstein. The bank manager and his wife, of course, believed him to be a young German gentleman of means until, on the morning of the day of his departure, Charles, in greatest confidence, revealed to them who his master really was. The English trio were utterly staggered. To Nellie, there was an element of romance at meeting a real prince in those rural solitudes of river and forest. As she declared to her mother, he was so nice and so unassuming. Just, indeed, like any ordinary man. And in her young mind she compared Albert Prince of Hesse-Holstein with the provincial young gentlemen whom she had met last season at the popular county function, the Stamford Ball.