u do mean to stay with me?' the margravine caught him up.

'Not in livery, your Highness.'

'To the deuce with you!' would be a fair translation of the exalted
lady's reply. She railed at his insufferable pride.

'And you were wrong, wrong,' she pursued. 'You offended the prince
mightily: you travestied his most noble ancestor--'

'In your service, may it please you.'

'You offended, offended him, I say, and you haven't the courage to make
reparation. And when I tell you the prince is manageable as your ship, if
you will only take and handle the rudder. Do you perceive?'

She turned to me.

'Hither, Mr. Harry; come, persuade him. Why, you do not desire to leave
me, do you?'

Much the reverse. But I had to congratulate myself subsequently on having
been moderate in the expression of my wishes; for, as my father explained
to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the margravine
was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his plans. She could
actually affect to wink at them that she might gain her point, and have
her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously beguiling a
hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially blind or wholly complaisant. My
father knew her and fenced her.

'Had I yielded,' he said, when my heart was low after the parting, 'I
should have shown her my hand. I do not choose to manage the prince that
the margravine may manage me. I pose my pride--immolate my son to it,
Richie? I hope not. No. At Vienna we shall receive an invitation to
Sarkeld for the winter, if we hear nothing of entreaties to turn aside to
Ischl at Munich. She is sure to entreat me to accompany her on her annual
visit to her territory of Rippau, which she detests; and, indeed, there
is not a vine in the length and breadth of it. She thought herself broad
awake, and I have dosed her with an opiate.'

He squeezed my fingers tenderly. I was in want both of consolation and
very delicate handling when we drove out of the little Wurtemberg town: I
had not taken any farewell from Ottilia. Baroness Turckems was already
exercising her functions of dragon. With the terrible forbidding word
'Repose' she had wafted the princess to her chamber in the evening, and
folded her inextricably round and round in the morning. The margravine
huffed, the prince icy, Ottilia invisible, I found myself shooting down
from the heights of a dream among shattered fragments of my cloud-palace
before I well knew that I had left off