onally;
she knew nothing of my existence; simply, fate moved us about blindly.
At court, she was invariably indisposed, and at the first court ball
she retired before I arrived. I got up at all times, galloped over all
roads, but never did I see her. She rode alone, too, part of the time.

The one picture of her which I was lucky enough to see had been taken
when she was six, and meant nothing to me in the way of identification.
For all I knew I might have passed her on the road. She became to me
the Princess in the Invisible Cloak, passing me often and doubtless
deriding my efforts to discern her. My curiosity became alarming. I
couldn't sleep for the thought of her. Finally we met, but the meeting
was a great surprise to us both. This meeting happened during the
great hubbub of which I have just written; and at the same time I met
another who had great weight in my future affairs.

The princess and I became rather well acquainted. I was not a
gentleman, according to her code, but, in the historic words of the
drug clerk, I was something just as good. She honored me with a frank,
disinterested friendship, which still exists. I have yet among my
fading souvenirs of diplomatic service half a dozen notes commanding me
to get up at dawn and ride around the lake, something like sixteen
miles. She was almost as reckless a rider as myself. She was truly a
famous rider, and a woman who sits well on a horse can never be aught
but graceful. She was, in fact, youthful and charming, with the most
magnificent black eyes I ever beheld in a Teutonic head; witty,
besides, and a songstress of no ordinary talent. If I had been in love
with her--which I solemnly vow I was not!--I should have called her
beautiful and exhausted my store of complimentary adjectives.

The basic cause of all this turmoil, about which I am to spin my
narrative, lay in her education. I hold that a German princess should
never be educated save as a German. By this I mean to convey that her
education should not go beyond German literature, German history,
German veneration of laws, German manners and German passivity and
docility. The Princess Hildegarde had been educated in England and
France, which simplifies everything, or, I should say, to be exact,
complicates everything.

She possessed a healthy contempt for that what-d'-ye-call-it that
hedges in a king. Having mingled with English-speaking people, she
returned to her native land, her