“I have received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to the Princess, the next evening, as soon as he came into the room. He announced this fact with a kind of bald promptitude and with a familiarity of manner which showed that his visit was one of a closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little surprised by it, and immediately asked how in the world the Prince could know his address. “Couldn't it have been by your old lady?” Muniment inquired. “He must have met her in Paris. It is from Paris that he writes.”

“What an incorrigible cad!” the Princess exclaimed.

“I don't see that — for writing to me. I have his letter in my pocket, and I will show it to you if you like.”

“Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched,” the Princess replied.

“You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked, with the quiet smile of a man who sees things as they are.

The Princess hesitated a little. “Yes, I make an exception for that, because it hurts him, it makes him suffer.”

“I should think, on the contrary, it would gratify him by showing you in a condition of weakness and dependence.”

“Not when he knows I don't use it for myself. What exasperates him is that it is devoted to ends which he hates almost as much as he hates me and yet which he can't call selfish.”

“He doesn't hate you,” said Muniment, with that tone of pleasant reasonableness that he used when he was most imperturbable. “His letter satisfies me of that.” The Princess stared, at this, and asked him what he was coming to — whether he were leading up to advising her to go back and live with her husband. “I don't know that I would go so far as to advise,” he replied; “when I have so much benefit from seeing you here, on your present footing, that wouldn't sound well. But I’ll just make bold to prophesy that you will go before very long.”

“And on what does that extraordinary prediction rest?”