seemed to me to be prodigiously old. A faint smile, a mere momentary alteration in the set of his thin lips, acknowledged my blushing confusion; and I became greatly interested to see him reach into the inside breast-pocket of his coat. He extracted therefrom a lead pencil and a block of detachable pages, which he handed to my uncle with an almost imperceptible bow.

I was very much astonished, but my uncle received it as a matter of course. He wrote rapidly something at which the other glanced and nodded slightly. A fine wrinkled hand—the hand was older than the face—patted my cheek and then rested on my head lightly, An unringing voice, a voice as colourless as the face itself, issued from his sunken lips, while the eyes, faded and still, looked down at me kindly.

‘And how old is this shy little boy?’

Before I could answer my uncle wrote down my age on the pad. I was deeply impressed. What was this ceremony? Was this personage too great to be spoken to? Again he glanced at the pad, and again gave a nod, and again that impersonal, mechanical voice was heard.

‘He resembles his grandfather.’

I remembered my paternal grandfather. He had died not long before. He, too, was prodigiously old. And to me it seemed perfectly natural that two such ancient and venerable persons should have known each other in the dim ages of creation before my birth. But my uncle obviously had not been aware of the fact. So obviously that the mechanical voice explained—

‘Yes, yes. Comrades in ’31. He was one of those who knew. Old times, my dear sir, old times …’

He made a gesture as if to put aside an importunate ghost. And now they were both looking down in silence. I wondered whether anything was expected from me. To my round, questioning eyes my uncle remarked, ‘He’s completely deaf.’ And the unrelated, inexpressive voice said: ‘Give me your hand.’

Acutely conscious of inky fingers, I put it out timidly. I had never seen a deaf person before and was rather startled. He pressed it firmly and then gave me a final pat on the head.

My uncle addressed me weightily.

‘You have shaken hands with Prince Roman S—.^* It’s something for you to remember when you grow up.’

I was impressed by his tone. I had enough historical information to know vaguely that the Princes S—counted amongst the sovereign princes of Ruthenia^* till the union of all Ruthenian lands to the kingdom of Poland, when they became great Polish magnates, sometime at the beginning of the fifteenth century. But what concerned me most was the failure of the fairy tale glamour. It was shocking to discover a prince who was deaf, bald, meagre and so prodigiously old. It never occurred to me that this imposing and disappointing man had been young, rich and beautiful. I could not know that he had been happy in the felicity of an ideal marriage uniting two young hearts, two great names and two great fortunes; happy with a happiness which, as in fairy tales, seemed destined to last for ever.…

But it did not last for ever. It was fated not to last very long, even by the measure of the days allotted to men’s passage on this earth where enduring happiness is only found in the conclusion of fairy tales. A daughter was born to them, and shortly afterwards the health of the young princess began to fail. For a time she bore up with smiling intrepidity, sustained by the feeling that now her existence was necessary for the happiness of two lives. But at last the husband, thoroughly alarmed by the rapid changes in her appearance, obtained an unlimited leave and took her away from the Capital, to his parents in the country.