as the accident of the case, Ottilia. We had to meet.'

'To meet?'

'There are circumstances when men will not accept apologies;
they--we--heaven knows, I was ready to do all that a man could do to
avoid this folly--wickedness; give it the worst of titles!'

'It did not occur accidentally?' she inquired. Her voice sounded strange,
half withheld in the utterance.

'It occurred,' said I, feeling my strength ebb and despair set in, 'it
occurred--the prince compelled me to the meet him.'

'But my cousin Otto is no assassin?

'Compelled, I say: that is, he conceived I had injured him, and left me
no other way of making amends.'

Her defence of Otto was in reality the vehement cherishing of her idea of
me. This caused her bewilderment, and like a barrier to the flowing of
her mind it resisted and resisted. She could not suffer herself to
realize that I was one of the brainless young savages, creatures with
claws and fangs.

Her face was unchanged to me. The homeliness of her large mild eyes
embraced me unshadowed, and took me to its inner fire unreservedly.
Leaning in my roomy chair, I contemplated her at leisure while my heart
kept saying 'Mine! mine!' to awaken an active belief in its possession.
Her face was like the quiet morning of a winter day when cloud and sun
intermix and make an ardent silver, with lights of blue and faint fresh
rose; and over them the beautiful fold of her full eyebrow on the eyelid
like a bending upper heaven. Those winter mornings are divine. They move
on noiselessly. The earth is still, as if awaiting. A wren warbles, and
flits through the lank drenched brambles; hill-side opens green;
elsewhere is mist, everywhere expectancy. They bear the veiled sun like a
sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of stainless cloud.

She was as fair. Gazing across her shoulder's gentle depression, I could
have desired to have the couchant brow, and round cheek, and rounding
chin no more than a young man's dream of woman, a picture alive, without
the animating individual awful mind to judge of me by my acts. I chafed
at the thought that one so young and lovely should meditate on human
affairs at all. She was of an age to be maidenly romantic: our situation
favoured it. But she turned to me, and I was glad of the eyes I knew. She
kissed me on the forehead.

'Sleep,' she whispered.

I feigned sleep to catch my happiness about me.

Some disenchanting thunder was coming, I was sure, and I was right.