“I want to help you,” said the Princess, and as she made this earnest appeal her face became transfigured; it wore an expression of the most passionate yet the purest longing. “I want to do something for the cause you represent; for the millions that are rotting under our feet—the millions whose whole life is passed on the brink of starvation, so that the smallest accident pushes them over. Try me, test me; ask me to put my hand to something, to prove that I am as deeply in earnest as those who have already given proof. I know what I am talking about—what one must meet and face and count with, the nature and the immensity of your organisation. I am not playing. No, I am not playing.” Paul Muniment watched her with his steady smile until this sudden outbreak had spent itself. “I was afraid you would be like this—that you would turn on the fountains and let off the fireworks.” “Permit me to believe you thought nothing about it. There is no reason my fireworks should disturb you.” “I have always had a fear of women.” “I see—that’s a part of your prudence,” said the Princess, reflectively. “But you are the sort of man who ought to know how to use them.” Muniment said nothing, immediately, in answer to this; the way he appeared to consider the Princess suggested that he was not following closely what she said, so much as losing himself in certain matters which were beside that question—her beauty, for instance, her grace, her fragrance, the spectacle of a manner and quality so new to him. After a little, however, he remarked, irrelevantly, “I’m afraid I’m very rude.” “Of course you are, but it doesn’t signify. What I mainly object to is that you don’t answer my questions. Would not some one else do Hyacinth Robinson’s work quite as well? Is it necessary to take a nature so delicate, so intellectual? Oughtn’t we to keep him for something finer?” “Finer than what?” “Than what Hoffendahl will call upon him to do.” “And pray what is that?” the young man demanded. “You know nothing about it; no more do I,” he added in a moment. “It will require whatever it will. Besides, if some one else might have done it, no one else volunteered. It happened that Robinson did.” “Yes, and you nipped him up!” the Princess exclaimed. At this expression Muniment burst out laughing. “I have no doubt you can easily keep him, if you want him.” “I should like to do it in his place—that’s what I should like,” said the Princess. “As I say, you don’t even know what it is.” “It may be nothing,” she went on, with her grave eyes fixed on her visitor. “I dare say you think that what I wanted to see you for was to beg you to let him off. But it wasn’t. Of course it’s his own affair, and you can do nothing. But oughtn’t it to make some difference, when his opinions have changed?” “His opinions? He never had any opinions,” Muniment replied. “He is not like you and me.”