had the power of passion, and it could be
stirred; but he who kindled it wrecked his chance if he could not stand
clear in her intellect's unsparing gaze. Twice already she must have
felt herself disillusioned by me. This third time, possibly, she blamed
her own fatally credulous tenderness, not me; but it was her third
awakening, and could affection and warmth of heart combat it? Her
child's enthusiasm for my country had prepared her for the impression
which the waxen mind of the dreamy invalid received deeply; and
so, aided by the emotional blood of youth, she gave me place in her
imagination, probing me still curiously, as I remembered, at a season
when her sedate mind was attaining to joint deliberations with the
impulsive overgenerous heart.

Then ensued for her the successive shocks of discernment. She knew the
to have some of the vices, many follies, all the intemperateness of men
who carve a way for themselves in the common roads, if barely they do
that. And resembling common men (men, in a judgement elective as hers,
common, however able), I was not assuredly to be separated by her from
my associations; from the thought of my father, for example. Her look at
him in the lake-palace library, and her manner in unfolding and folding
his recent letter to her, and in one or two necessitated allusions,
embraced a kind of grave, pitiful humour, beyond smiles or any outward
expression, as if the acknowledgement that it was so quite obliterated
the wonder that it should be so--that one such as he could exercise
influence upon her destiny. Or she may have made her reckoning
generally, not personally, upon our human destinies: it is the
more likely, if, as I divine, the calm oval of her lifted eyelids
contemplated him in the fulness of the recognition that this world,
of which we hope unuttered things, can be shifted and swayed by an
ignis-fatuus. The father of one now seen through, could hardly fail of
being transfixed himself. It was horrible to think of. I would rather
have added a vice to my faults than that she should have penetrated him.

Nearing the island, I was reminded of the early morning when I landed
on the Flemish flats. I did not expect a similar surprise, but before my
rowers had pulled in, the tall beaconhead of old Schwartz notified that
his mistress might be abroad. Janet walked with her. I ran up the steps
to salute them, and had Ottilia's hand in mine.

'Prince Ernest has arrived?'

'My father cam