Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/259

 spring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence—nothing but Giants and Pygmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him as her lover.

"If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!" gasped Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlik

"I am told—" whispered the old Bishop of Frumps

"New story upstairs," said the first footman, as he nibbled among the dessert things. "So far as I can make out this here giant Princess"

"They say—" said the lady who kept the stationer's shop by the main entrance to the Palace, where the little Americans get their tickets for the State Apartments

And then:

"We are authorised to deny—" said "Picaroon" in Gossip.

And so the whole trouble came out.

IV

"They say that we must part," the Princess said to her lover.

"But why?" he cried. "What new folly have these people got into their heads?"

"Do you know," she asked, "that to love me—is high treason?"

"My dear," he cried; "but does it matter? What is their right—right without a shadow of reason—and their treason and their loyalty to us?"