“Ah, she wrote to you to come?” The Captain fixed Hyacinth for a moment with his curious colourless eyes. “Do you know you are a devilish privileged mortal?” “Certainly, I know that.” Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the bar-maid, who had heard this odd couple talking about a princess, was staring at him too, with her elbows on the counter. “Do you know there are people who would give their heads that she should write to them to come?” “I have no doubt of it whatever!” Hyacinth exclaimed, taking refuge in a laugh which did not sound as natural as he would have liked, and wondering whether his interlocutor were not precisely one of these people. In this case the bar-maid might well stare; for deeply convinced as our young man might be that he was the son of Lord Frederick Purvis, there was really no end to the oddity of his being preferred—and by a princess—to Captain Sholto. If anything could have reinforced, at that moment, his sense of this anomaly, it would have been the indescribably gentlemanly way, implying all sorts of common initiations, in which his companion went on— “Ah, well, I see you know how to take it! And if you are in correspondence with her why do you say that you can hear from her only through me? My dear fellow, I am not in correspondence with her. You might think I would naturally be, but I am not.” He subjoined, as Hyacinth had laughed again, in a manner that might have passed for ambiguous, “So much the worse for me—is that what you mean?” Hyacinth replied that he himself had had the honour of hearing from the Princess only once, and he mentioned that she had told him that her letter-writing came only in fits, when it was sometimes very profuse: there were months together that she didn’t touch a pen. “Oh, I can imagine what she told you!” the Captain exclaimed. “Look out for the next fit! She is visiting about. It’s a great thing to be in the same house with her—an immense comedy.” He remarked that he had heard, now he remembered, that she either had taken, or was thinking of taking, a house in the country for a few months, and he added that if Hyacinth didn’t propose to finish his brandy and soda they might as well turn out. Hyacinth’s thirst had been very superficial, and as they turned out the Captain observed, by way of explanation of his having been found in a public-house (it was the only attempt of this kind he made), that any friend of his would always know him by his love of curious out-of-the-way nooks. “You must have noticed that,” he said—“my taste for exploration. If I hadn’t explored I never should have known you, should I? That was rather a nice little girl in there; did you twig her figure? It’s a pity they always have such beastly hands.” Hyacinth, instinctively, had made a motion to go southward, but Sholto, passing a hand into his arm, led him the other way. The house they had quitted was near a corner, which they rounded, the Captain pushing forward as if there were some reason for haste.