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. My
father entered.

'Princess!' He did amazed and delighted homage, and forthwith
uncontrollably poured out the history of my heroism, a hundred words
for one;--my promptitude in picking the prince's glove up on my sword's
point, my fine play with the steel, my scornful magnanimity, the
admiration of my fellow-students;--every line of it; in stupendous
language; an artillery celebration of victory. I tried to stop him.
Ottilia rose, continually assenting, with short affirmatives, to his
glorifying interrogations--a method he had of recapitulating the main
points. She glanced to right and left, as if she felt caged.

'Is it known?' I heard her ask, in the half audible strange voice which
had previously made me tremble.

'Known? I certify to you, princess,'--the unhappy man spouted his
withering fountain of interjections over us anew; known in every Court
and garrison of Germany! Known by this time in Old England! And, what
was more, the correct version of it was known! It was known that the
young Englishman had vanquished his adversary with the small sword, and
had allowed him, because he had raged demoniacally on account