This had seemed to Mary to be a fair arrangement, although, when she met Vicky Fanshawe, a precocious schoolgirl, five years her junior, she could not feel that they were destined to become soul-mates.

Vicky, however, was being educated, at immense expense, first at a fashionable school on the south coast of England, and later at a still more fashionable finishing school in Switzerland. During the last two years, she had spent her holidays abroad with Ermyntrude, so that Mary had hardly encountered her. Her education was now considered to be completed, and she was living at home, a source of pride and joy to her mother, but not precisely an ideal companion for Mary, who was alternately amused and exasperated by her.

She reflected, on this warm September morning, that the presence of a Russian prince in the house would be productive of all Vicky's most tiresome antics, and inquired in tones of foreboding whether the Prince were young.

"Well, I wouldn't say young," replied Ermyntrude, helping herself to marmalade. "He's at what I call the right age, if you know what I mean. You never saw anyone so distinguished - and then his manners! Well, you don't meet with such polish in England, not that I'm one to run down my own country, but there it is."

"I don't like Russians much," said Mary perversely. "'They always seem to talk so much and do so little."

"You shouldn't be narrow-minded, dear. Besides, he isn't actually a Russian, as I've told you a dozen times. He's a Georgian - he used to have a lovely estate in the Caucasus, which is somewhere near the Black Sea, I believe."

At this moment the door opened, and Wally Carter came into the room. He was a medium-sized man, who had been good-looking in youth, but who had run rather badly to seed. His blue eyes were inclined to be blood shot, and his mouth, under a drooping moustache, sagged a little.