planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire. If it was the fault of the rich, as Paul Muniment held, the selfish, congested rich who allowed such abominations to flourish, that made no difference and only shifted the shame; since the terrestrial globe, a visible failure, produced the cause as well as the effect. It didn’t occur to our young man that the Princess had withdrawn her confidence from him because, for the work of investigating still further the condition of the poor, she had placed herself in the hands of Lady Aurora. He could have no jealousy of the noble spinster; he had too much respect for her philanthropy, the thoroughness of her knowledge and her capacity to answer any question it could come into the Princess’s extemporising head to ask, and too acute a consciousness of his own desultory and superficial view of the great question. It was enough for him that the little parlour in Madeira Crescent was a spot round which his thoughts could revolve and toward which his steps could direct themselves with an unalloyed sense of security and privilege. The picture of it hung before him half the time in colours to which the feeling of the place gave a rarity that doubtless didn’t literally characterise the scene. His relations with the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as natural as anything else—everything in life was queer enough; he had by this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. “Of each”—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe was simply quite fond of him. The quiet, familiar, fraternal welcome he found on the nasty winter nights was proof enough of that. They sat together like very old friends whom long pauses, during which they merely looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, couldn’t make uncomfortable. Not that the element of silence was the principal part of their conversation, for it interposed only when they had talked a great deal. Hyacinth, on the opposite side of the fire, felt at times almost as if he were married to his hostess, so many things were taken for granted between them. For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamplight, interfused with domestic embarrassments and confidences that all turned to the jocular, the Princess was incomparable. It was her theory of her present existence that she was picnicking, but all the accidents of the business were happy accidents. There was a household quietude in her steps and gestures, in the way she sat, in the way she listened, in the way she played with the cat or looked after the fire or folded Madame Grandoni’s ubiquitous shawl; above all in the inveteracy with which she spent her evenings at home,