was brilliantly sunny, and both the promenade and the Row were crowded.  Slightly hidden behind a tree, he stood and watched.  A gay crowd of promenaders passed along the broad path, and the air was filled with the echo of laughter, the jargon of the day, intimate references to a common world, invitations lightly given and lightly accepted.  It was Sunday morning, in a season when colour was the craze of the moment, and the women who swept by seemed to his rather mystical fancy like the flowers in some of the great open spaces he knew so well, stirred into movement by a soft wind.  They were very beautiful, these western women; handsome, too, the men with whom they talked and flirted.  Always they had that air, however, of absolute complacency, as though they felt nothing of the quest which lay like a thread of torture amongst the nerves of Prince Shan’s being.  There was no more distinguished figure among the men there than he himself, and yet the sense of alienation grew in his heart as he watched.  There were many familiar faces, many to whom he could have spoken, no one who would not have greeted him with interest, even with gratification.  And yet he had never been so deeply conscious of the gulf which lay between the oriental fatalism of his life and ways and the placid self-assurance of these westerners, so well-content with the earth upon which their feet fell.  He had judged with perfect accuracy the place which he held in their thoughts and estimation.  He was something of a curiosity, his title half a joke, the splendour of his long race a thing unrealisable by these scions of a more recent aristocracy.  Yet supposing that this new wonder had not come into his life, that Immelan had been a shade more eloquent, had pleaded his cause upon a higher level, that Naida Karetsky also had formed a different impression of the world which he was studying so earnestly,—­what a transformation he could have brought upon this light-hearted and joyous scene!  The scales had so nearly balanced; at the bottom of his heart he was conscious of a certain faint contempt for the almost bovine self-satisfaction of a nation without eyes.  Literature and painting, art in all its far-flung branches, even science, were suffering in these days from a general and paralysing inertia.  Life which demanded no sacrifice of anybody was destructive of everything in the nature of aspiration.  Sport seemed to be the only incentive to sobriety, the desire to live long in this fat land the only brake upon an era of self-indulgence.  He looked eastwards to where his own millions were toiling, with his day-by-day maxims in their ears, and it seemed to his elastic fancy that he was inhaling a long breath of cooler and more vigorous life.