When we sat down in the drawing room after taking coffee, the Prince proposed that we join him in a game of cards, and it happened that I was lucky that evening to a degree that drew attention, especially as he was at my side.. Thelma, near the gramophone, was presiding over the choice of music, and suddenly she proposed dancing. The Prince's face lit up as he agreed to the proposal; then he directed General Trotter to roll up the carpet, and stretched out his arms, inviting Thelma to dance with him.. Then he danced briefly with me and with Connie, and I learned that he was a skillful dancer; but suddenly he seemed tired, and he stopped in the middle of the room, looked at us, and said: Since this is your first visit to the Fort, I want to tell you about the rules here.. There is no trace of any rule... Stay up as long as you like and rise whenever you please.. This is a place for change and rest. And on that he went off early to his bed, so as to wake refreshed and work in the garden.

After the Prince withdrew, the party broke up.. and when I retired with Ernest to our room I spoke to him of my wonder and astonishment at this life the Prince leads, for there was no trace in

it of what I had heard about the bachelor Prince who never sleeps before dawn. But Ernest assured me that the Prince's very coming to the Fort was glaring proof of the "bohemian" side of his life: he comes only to escape the monotonous life of the palace and its tedious "routine".. Yet his answer did not convince me, nor did it answer my questioning about the life of this Prince, which I saw as a bundle of contradictions: merry at one moment and sad at others, his personality reveals itself for an instant, only to disappear for hours behind a thick veil.

The morning was of a piece with the night before. When the maid brought our food, she told us the Prince had taken his breakfast an hour earlier and gone out into the garden.. And when I went down with Ernest to the drawing room, I noticed a figure approaching from afar among the garden trees, a pail, shears, and a hoe in his hand.. It was the Prince, with his two dogs, "Cora" and "Jaggs," leaping merrily around him..

I was prepared to accept anything new, but Ernest was not, and so the proposal the Prince put forward took him by surprise.. He invited the guests to help him cut the branches of the "laurel," which choke the growth of the other plantings, and which he calls his sworn enemy, and which he will not cease fighting even if it should cost him his last friend.

When Ernest went up to change his clothes, the Prince took me to the terrace to see the sweep of the grounds surrounding the Fort, and at a great distance I saw a small lake known as "Virginia Water"... He introduced me to the various trees, and to the plantings he had set with his own hands, and from time to time he would remark that this place was not beautiful by London's standards of beauty, yet to him it was paradise. Then, as if catching himself, thinking he had gone on too long about the private things dear to him, he fell to apologizing again, saying there was no need to trouble anyone else with such talk. The guests had arrived with their gear, and everyone looked