Susan came up to Grant, smiling, about half an hour later. She had left Bobby Lancaster and his sister seated on a divan.

“Aren’t you flattered, Grant?” she exclaimed. “You’ve been labelled dangerous. Kings have been summoned to the help of the terrified husband. Look, they’ve made the poor woman sit at a table and play roulette, which she hates, with His Majesty on one side, her husband behind her chair, and Blunn, like a patron saint, hovering around.”

Grant looked at the little phalanx and nodded.

“Well,” he admitted, “I’m half inclined to believe you’re right. It does seem to be a plot. Where’s your father?”

“Gone home,” she answered. “He was very angry with Mr. Blunn.”

“All the same, it was clever,” Grant observed. “I’ll bet he’s got a dozen copies of those few remarks of his ready for print and distribution in the States. The audacity of it all is so amazing. There were you and I and Gertrude, to say nothing of the Prince, who knew the whole secret, absolutely within a few yards of him,—knew how he fought to get that gloomy Scandinavian back to Nice in time to vote. He just laughs at us and ignores it all. We’re only one or two. It is the millions he wants. It’s magnificent!”

“Since I’m afraid it’s quite hopeless for you to get anywhere near the enchanting Princess, would you like to talk to me for a few minutes?” she invited.

“We’ll find that greedy corner in the Bar,” he assented, turning away with her, “where you eat up all the chocolate eclairs.”

She sighed.

“I wish I weren’t so fond of food. People won’t believe that I have sentiment when they watch my appetite. However,” she went on cheerfully, “I shan’t want anything more to eat to-day, nor to-morrow, as a matter of fact.”

“It was a great dinner,” he acknowledged. “We’ll have an orangeade and go through the courses. They were something to dream of.”

“If you’re going to talk about food,” she began peevishly,

“Not necessarily food,” he interrupted, as they selected their easy chairs. “There were the wines—that Chateau Yquem, for instance. Terrible to drink it after champagne, but it was a dream.”

“How long are you going to stay in the States.-’” she asked.

“Until you’re grown up,” he replied. “Then I’m coming back to see what sort of a woman you have become.”

“You will probably find me married to Bobby Lancaster,” she warned him. “He proposed to me to-night in an entirely different way and I was really touched. I don’t see why one should wait forever for a man who never asks one, and who talks about going to the other end of the world as though he was slipping into Corret’s to have his hair cut.”

“Meaning me?”

“Meaning you.”

For a single moment Grant felt that he had exchanged his thirty-one years for her nineteen. She was smiling at him with all the gentle savoir faire of a woman of the world. He himself was embarrassed.

“Aren’t you by way of being an extremist?” he enquired. “Even if one might hesitate to ask you to leap into sedate middle age, it seems rather a pity for you to marry into the nursery.”

“Bobby is twenty-four,” she declared indignantly.

“You amaze me,” he confessed. “But consider those twenty-four years. We will leave out the perambulator stages. Fifteen to nineteen at Eton—cricket and rackets. Twenty to twenty-four, a guardsman—rather more cricket, rather more rackets. It is a full and busy life, child, but it makes for youth.”

She smiled serenely.

“You don’t understand,” she remonstrated. “Cricket is almost our religion. I asked the Captain of the Australians to marry me when I was fourteen.”

“He spared you?”

She nodded.

“He gave me his daughter’s photograph. She was much older than I was, very thin and she squinted. It wasn’t really a romance—it was cricket.”

“Is Bobby any good?” he asked.

She sighed.

“That’s rather the pity of it,” she admitted. “He very seldom makes any runs and he has ninety-five different excuses, or rather explanations, for the way in which he got out.”

“I don’t think I’m missing much in cricket,” Grant reflected. “I played halfback for Harvard. Football isn’t a bad game, you know.”

She looked at him sympathetically.

“That must have been back in the dim past,” she observed. “Long before the sedate middle-aged feeling came upon you.”

“Susan, I want to tell you this. You’re a delightful child and an amusing tomboy and I’ve often wished that you were just a few years older.”

“Why?” she demanded breathlessly.

“Never mind. But, in addition to youth, you have a brain, and you’re one of the pluckiest girls I’ve ever had with me in a tight corner. Don’t think I’ve forgotten it, because I haven’t.”

“Rubbish!” she laughed.

“And I’m going to say this to you,” he continued, turning towards her, so that she suddenly saw that he was in earnest, and became very still indeed, “I’ve got a half-finished job on my hands, and how it will turn out I don’t know. It will be a matter of six months before I’m through. When I’m through, I’m coming right back. And, Susan, I don’t want to say too much, but I don’t think those boys are going to be quite what you deserve in life. It’s horrible to feel a little too old.”

She suddenly gripped his hand.

“Idiot!” she murmured. “You’re not a bit too old. I wouldn’t marry Bobby Lancaster if he were the last man on earth.”

She was looking at him with a suspicious mistiness in her eyes. Her mouth was quivering just a little. And then it all passed. She was herself again,—slim, girlish, delightful, with the audacity of a child and the certain promise of the woman’s beauty in her delicate immaturity.

“I don’t know how I can trust you to cross the Atlantic alone,” she laughed. “How many of the crew of the Grey Lady have you sacked?”

“Not one,” he admitted. “I’ve forgiven them all. You don’t think Blunn is going to smuggle himself and a few desperate plotters on board, do you? Or put an infernal machine there to blow me sky-high?”

She shook her head.

“I’m half honest,” she said thoughtfully, “when I tell you frankly that I don’t like letting you go alone. You, in your sedate middle age, do need a little looking after, sometimes, you know—somebody with the common sense of youth. However, it’s just an id............