th a task for my hand
and head;--no mean stretch of devotion on his part. Ottilia was still my
princess; she my providence. She wrote:

'Come home, my friend Harry: you have been absent too long. He who
intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel,
and you nearer home. The home is always here where I am, but it may now
take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now
really loss of life. I tell you no more. You know me, that when I say
come, it is enough.'

A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter. Not a word
of Prince Hermann. What had happened? I guessed at it curiously and
incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope
as soon as I seemed to have divined it. I did not wrong my soul's
high mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in
perplexity struck at impossibilities. Ottilia would never have summoned
me to herself. But was Janet free? The hope which refused to live in
that other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the bare
thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset it.
Had my girl's courage failed, to spare her at the last moment? I fancied
it might be: I was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on me with
the force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the
little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me
back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well. It
cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.

I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to
pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that
two of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the
betrothal of one of them to an Englishman. The turn of the tide had come
to him. And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I have
to speak of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of the
autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be his
duty to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so many
of our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible offence
when the occasion for continuing it draws to a close. The pleasant
narrator in the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not the
philosopher who has come to know himself and his relations toward the
universe. The words of this last are one to twenty;