time came about when the
Dictator had begun to be afraid of the part he was playing--of the time
when the Dictator grew acquainted with his heart, and searched what
stirred it so--according to the tender and lovely words of Beaumont and
Fletcher--and, alas! had found it love. Strange that these two hearts so
thoroughly affined should be so misjudging each of the other! It was
like the story told in Uhland's touching poem, which probably no one
reads now, even in Uhland's own Germany, about the youth who is leaving
his native town for ever, accompanied by the _geleit_--the escort, the
'send-off'--of his companion-students, and who looks back to the window
which the maiden has just opened and thinks, 'If she had but loved me!'
and a tear comes into the girl's deep blue eye, and she closes her
window, hopeless, and thinks, 'If he had but loved me!'

'And now he is going!' thought Helena. And at that hour Ericson was
waking up, aroused from sleep by the sound of his own softly-breathed
word 'Helena!'

'It is now his birthday,' she thought.

Soame Rivers was not in his character very like Hamlet. But of course
there is that one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin, and
the touch of nature that made Hamlet and Soame Rivers kin to-night was
found in the fact that on this night, as on a memorable night of
Hamlet's career, in his heart there was 'a kind of fighting' that would
not let him sleep. He sat up fully dressed. The one thing present to his
mind was the thought that, if anything whatever should happen to the
Dictator--and the more the night grew later, the more the possibility
seemed to enlarge upon him--the ruin of all Soame Rivers's career seemed
certain. Inquiry would assuredly be made into the exact hour when the
telegram was sent from the Foreign Office and when it was received at
Sir Rupert Langley's, and it would be known that Rivers had that
telegram for hours in his hands without telling anyone about it. It was
easy in the light and the talk of the dining-room and the billiard-room
to tell one's self that there could be no possible danger threatening
anyone in an English gentleman's country-house. But now, in the deep of
the night, in the loneliness, with the knowledge of what Sarrasin had
said, all looked so different. It was easy at that earlier and brighter
and more self-confident hour to crumple up a telegram and make nothing
of it; but now Soame Rivers could only curse himself for his levity and