The Princess Passes

								

with my health--a possession usually treated as we treat the poor,
whom we expect to have always with us. Helen Blantock had been the
success of her season in London, had paid for her triumphs with a
breakdown, and we had stopped at the same hotel.
The girl's reputation as a beauty had marched before her, blowing
trumpets. She was the prettiest girl in Davos, as she had been the
prettiest in London; and I shared with other normal, self-respecting
men the amiable weakness of wishing to monopolise the woman most
wanted by others. During the process I fell in love, and Helen was
kind.
Lady Blantock, a matron of comfortable rotundity of figure and a
placid way of folding plump, white hands, had, however, a
contradictorily cold and watchful eye, which I had feared at first;
but it had softened for me, and I accepted the omen. In the spring,
when my London tyrant had pronounced me "sound as a bell," I had
proposed to Helen. The girl said neither yes nor no, but she had eyes
and a smile which needed no translation, so I kissed her (it was in a
conservatory at a dance) and was happy--for a fortnight.
Then came this bidding to dinner. Lady Blantock wrote the invitation,
of course, but it was natural to suppose that she did it to please her
daughter. It happened to be my birthday, and I fancied that Helen had
kept the date in mind. Besides, the selection of the guests had
apparently been made with an eye to my pleasure.
There was Jack Winston, who had lately married an American heiress,
not because she was an heiress, but because she was adorable; there
was the heiress herself, née Molly Randolph, whom I had known
through Winston's letters before I saw her lovely, laughing face;
there was Sir Horace Jerveyson, the richest grocer in the world, whom
I suspected Lady Blantock of actually regarding as a human being, and
a suitable successor to the late Sir James. Besides these, there was
only myself, Montagu Lane; and I believed that the dinner had been
arranged with a view to my claims as leading man in the love drama of
which Helen Blantock was leading lady, the other characters in the
scene merely being "on" as our "support." If this idea argued conceit,
I was punished.
It was with the entrée that the blow fell, and I had a curious,
impersonal sort of feeling that on every night to come, should I live
for a hundred years, each future entrée of each future dinner
would recall the sensation of this moment. Something inside me, that
was myself yet not myself, chuckled at the thought, and made a note to
avoid entrées.
We had been asking each others' plans for August. Molly and Jack had
said that they were going to Switzerland to try the new Mercédès,
which had been given as a wedding present to the girl by a school
friend of that name, and of many dollars.
Then, solely to be civil, not because I wanted to know, I asked Sir
Horace Jerveyson what he meant to do. Hardly did I even expect to hear