He had been born a gentleman--though he had no more right to the title of "prince" than I had. True, at college at Cheltenham he had been nicknamed "the prince," because of his charming manner and elegant airs. Few of us even imagined, however, that he would, in later years, pass himself off as a German princeling and gull the public into providing him with the wherewithal to live in ease and luxury. As he stood at the handsome woman's side, thoughts of the past--bitter and regretful--flashed upon him. His conscience pricked him. "Princess!--I--I--" he stammered. "Well?" and her sweet red lips parted in a smile. "I--ah! yes, it's madness. I--I know I'm a fool! I see danger in all this. I have jeopardised your good name sufficiently already. People are looking at us now--and they will surely misjudge us!" "You are not a fool, my dear Jack," she answered in her charming broken English. "You are what you call a goose." And she laughed outright. "But think! What will they say?" "They may say just whatever pleases them," she answered airily, glancing at the half a dozen or so smartly dressed people taking tea in the beautiful Italian garden overlooking the red roofs and cupolas of the Lily City, Florence. "They--the world--have already said hard things about me. But what do I really care?" "_You_ care for the Prince's honour, as well as your own," he ventured in a low serious voice, looking straight into her blue eyes. Her Imperial and Royal Highness Angelica Pia Marie Therese Crown-Princess of Bosnia, and daughter of a reigning Emperor, was acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful and accomplished women in Europe. Her photographs were everywhere, and a year before, at her brilliant marriage in Vienna, all the States of Europe were represented, and her photograph had appeared in every illustrated newspaper on the two Continents. The world, ignorant of the tragedy of life behind a throne, believed the royal marriage to be a love-match, but the bitter truth remained that it was merely the union of two imperial houses, without the desire of either the man, or the woman. Princess Angelica had, at the bidding of the Emperor, sacrificed her love and her young life to a man for whom she had only contempt and loathing. As she stood there, a tall, frail figure, in plain white embroidered muslin, her fair hair soft beneath her big black hat, her sweet delicately moulded face and her eyes of that deep childlike blue that one so seldom sees in girls after fourteen, there was upon her countenance an undisguised love-look. She was indeed the perfect incarnation of all that was graceful and feminine; little more indeed, than a girl, and yet the wife of a prince that would ere long become a king. For a few moments the man and the woman regarded each other in silence. He was spell-bound by her wondrous beauty like many another man had been. But she knew, within herself, that he was the only man she had ever met that she could love.