th details of this parallel.
Meanwhile Bederhof tears his hair, for I threaten to be behind
time, and the good Duchess tells me thrice daily that Elsa is
timid. Princess Heinrich has made no sign yet; when she frowns I
must kiss. So stands the matter. I must go hence to pray her to
walk in the woods with me. She will flush and flutter, but, poor
child, she will come. What I ask she will not and must not
refuse. But, deuce take it, I ask so little! There's the rub! I
hear your upbraiding voice, 'Pooh, man, catch her up and kiss
her!' Ah, my dear Varvilliers, you suffer under a confusion. She
is a duty; and who is impelled by duty to these sudden cuttings
of a knot? And she does a duty, and would therefore not kiss me
in return. And I also, doing duty, am duty. Thus we are both of
us strangled in the black coils of that belauded serpent."

I did not tell Varvilliers everything. Had I allowed myself complete
unreserve I must have added that she charmed me, and that the very charm
I found in her made my work harder. There was a dainty delicacy about
her, the freshness of a flower whose velvet bloom no finger-touch has
rubbed. This I was to destroy.

But at last from fear, not of the gardener's smiles, but of my own
ridicule, I made my start, and, as I foreshadowed to Varvilliers, it was
as we walked in the woods that I began.

"What of that grenadier?" I asked her--she was sitting on a seat, while
I leaned against a tree-trunk--"the grenadier you were in love with when
I was at Bartenstein. You remember? You described him to me."

She blushed and laughed a little.

"He married a maid of my mother's, and became one of the hall-porters.
He's grown so fat."

"The dream is ended then?"

"Yes, if it ever began," she answered. "How amused at me you must have
been!"

Suddenly she perceived my gaze on her, and her eyes fell.

"He was Romance, Elsa," said I. "He has married and grown fat. His
business now is to shut doors; he has shut the door on himself."

"Yes," she answered, half-puzzled, half-embarrassed.

"He had an unsuccessful rival," said I. "Do you recollect him? A lanky
boy whom nobody cared much about. Elsa, the grenadier is out of the
question."

Now she was agitated; but she sat still and silent. I moved and stood
before her. My whole desire was to mitigate her fear and shrinking. She
looked up at me gravely and steadily. It went to my heart