Besides, he felt that he deserved some sort of punishment for looking so high in the Duchy of Rapp-Thorberg.
Not that he was in love with the proud Princess Genevra; he denied that to himself a hundred times a day as he sat in his bungalow and smoked the situation over.
He had proved to himself, quite beyond a doubt, that he was not in love, when, like a bolt from a clear sky, she stepped out of the oblivion into which he had cast her, to smile upon him without warning.

It was most unfair.

Her smile had been one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the effort to return a fair and final verdict.
As he sat in the shade of his bungalow porch on the afternoon of her arrival, he lamented that every argument he had presented in the cause of common sense had been knocked into a cocked hat by that electric smile.

Could anything be more miraculous than that she should come to the unheard-of island of Japat--unless, possibly, that he should be there when she came?
She was there for him to look upon and love and lose, just as he had dreamed all these months.

It mattered little that she was now the wife of Prince Karl of Brabetz; to him she was still the Princess Genevra of Rapp-Thorberg.
If he had ever hoped that she might be more to him than an unattainable divinity, he was not fool enough to imagine that such a hope could be realised.