He beau masque! He, knowing her, had fallen beneath her starry spell.

He was Paul Kegworthy, Paul Savelli, what you like; Paul the adventurer, Paul the man born to great things.

She was a beautiful woman, bearing the title of Princess, the title that had haunted his life since first the Vision Splendid dawned upon him as he lay on his stomach eavesdropping and heard the words of the divinely-smelling goddess who had given him his talisman, the cornelian heart.

To "rank himself with princes" had been the intense meaning of his life since ragged and fiercely imaginative childhood.

Odd circumstances had ranked him with Sophie Zobraska.