arrival over there, to follow my directions.'

'You won't leave me?'

Miss Goodwin had promised to meet the foreign ladies on the pier. We
quarrelled and made it up a dozen times like girl and boy, I calling
her aunt Clara, as in the old days, and she calling me occasionally
son Richie: an imitation of my father's manner of speech to me when we
formed acquaintance first in Venice. But I was very little aware of what
I was saying or doing. The forces of my life were yoked to the heart,
and tumbled as confusedly as the world under Phaethon charioteer. We
walked on the heights above the town. I looked over the water to the
white line of shore and batteries where this wonder stood, who was what
poets dream of, deep-hearted men hope for, none quite believe in.
Hardly could I; and though my relenting spinster friend at my elbow kept
assuring me it was true that she was there, my sceptical sight fixed on
the stale prominences visible in the same features which they had worn
day after empty day of late. This deed of hers was an act of devotion
great as death. I knew it from experience consonant to Ottilia's
character; but could a princess, hereditary, and bound in the league
of governing princes, dare so to brave her condition? Complex of mind,
simplest in character, the uncontrollable nobility of her spirit was no
sooner recognized by me than I was shocked throughout by a sudden light,
contrasting me appallingly with this supreme of women, who swept the
earth aside for truth. I had never before received a distinct intimation
of my littleness of nature, and my first impulse was to fly from
thought, and then, as if to prove myself justly accused, I caught myself
regretting--no, not regretting, gazing, as it were, on a picture of
regrets--that Ottilia was not a romantic little lady of semi-celestial
rank, exquisitely rash, wilful, desperately enamoured, bearing as many
flying hues and peeps of fancy as a love-ballad, and not more roughly
brushing the root-emotions.

If she had but been such an one, what sprightly colours, delicious
sadness, magical transformations, tenderest intermixture of earth and
heaven; what tears and sunbeams, divinest pathos: what descents from
radiance to consolatory twilight, would have surrounded me for poetry
and pride to dwell on! What captivating melody in the minor key would
have been mine, though I lost her--the legacy of it all for ever! Say a
petulant princess, a star of beauty, mad for me, a