business to do, but he believed the Master knew how to pick out his men. To be sure they had known nothing about him in advance; he had only been suggested from one day to the other by those who were always looking out. The fact remained, however, that when Hyacinth stood before him he recognised him as the sort of little chap he had in his eye—one who could pass through a very small opening. Humanity, in his scheme, was classified and subdivided with a truly German thoroughness and altogether of course from the point of view of the revolution—as it might forward or obstruct that cause. Hyacinth’s little job was a very small part of what Hoffendahl had come to England for; he had in his hand innumerable other threads. Hyacinth knew nothing of these and didn’t much want to know, except for the portentous wonder of the way Hoffendahl kept them apart. He had exactly the same mastery of them that a great musician—that the Princess herself—had of the keyboard of the piano; he treated all things, persons, institutions, ideas, as so many notes in his great symphonic massacre. The day would come when—far down in the treble—one would feel one’s self touched by the little finger of the composer, would grow generally audible (with a small sharp crack) for a second. It was impossible that our young man shouldn’t become aware at the end of ten minutes that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention: she was listening to him as she had never listened before. He enjoyed that high effect on her, and his sense of the tenuity of the thread by which his future hung, renewed by his hearing himself talk about it, made him reflect that at present anything in the line of enjoyment, any scrap filched from the feast of life, was so much gained for eager young experience. The reader may judge if he had held his breath and felt his heart-beats after placing himself on his new footing of utility in the world; but that emotion had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture—through an exaltation which alternated with despair and which, equally with the despair, he concealed more successfully than he supposed. He would have detested the idea that his companion might have heard his voice tremble while he told his story; but though to-day he had really grown used to his danger and resigned, as it were, to his consecration, and though it couldn’t fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that, like some famous novel, he was thrilling, he still couldn’t guess how very remarkable, in such a connexion, the Princess thought his composure, his lucidity, his good humour. It is true she tried to hide her wonder, for she owed it to her self-respect to let it still appear that even such a one as she was prepared for a personal sacrifice as complete. She had the air—or she endeavoured to have it—of accepting for him everything that he accepted for himself; nevertheless there was something rather forced in the smile (lovely as