“Certainly I know it.” Hyacinth blushed and felt foolish; the barmaid, who had heard this odd couple talking of a princess, was staring at him too with her elbows on the counter. “Do you know there are people who’d give their heads that she should write them to come?” “I’ve no doubt of it whatever!”—and he took refuge in a laugh that sounded less natural than he would have liked, and wondered if his interlocutor weren’t precisely one of these people. In this case the barmaid 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 re-enforced 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’re in correspondence with her why do you say you can hear from her only through me? My dear fellow, I’m not in correspondence with her. You might think I’d naturally be, but I’m 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 but once, and mentioned her having told him how her letter-writing came on 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 knowingly returned. “Look out for the next fit! She’s visiting about, you know—at a lot of great houses. It’s a great thing to be somewhere 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 place 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 rum 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 good bust? It’s a pity they always have such beastly hands.” Hyacinth had instinctively 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. His haste was checked, however, by a prompt encounter with a young woman who, coming in the opposite direction, turned the angle as briskly as themselves. At this moment