conduct as the Prince;
have I even done my duty as a husband?" Otto asked.

"Nay, nay," said Gotthold, earnestly and eagerly, "this is another
chapter. I am an old celibate, an old monk. I cannot advise you in your
marriage."

"Nor do I require advice," said Otto, rising. "All of this must cease."
And he began to walk to and fro with his hands behind his back.

"Well, Otto, may God guide you!" said Gotthold, after a considerable
silence. "I cannot."

"From what does all this spring?" said the Prince, stopping in his walk.
"What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted
vanity? What matter names, if it has brought me to this? I could never
bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom
from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed
in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done
smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my
Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage," he added more
hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not
intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an
impotent picture!"

"Ay, we have the same blood," moralised Gotthold. "You are drawing, with
fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic."

"Sceptic?--coward!" cried Otto. "Coward is the word. A springless,
putty-hearted, cowering coward!"

And as the Prince rapped out the words in tones of unusual vigour, a
little, stout old gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold, received
them fairly in the face. With his parrot's beak for a nose, his pursed
mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture of formality; and in
ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he
impressed the beholder with a certain air of frozen dignity and wisdom.
But at the smallest contrariety, his trembling hands and disconnected
gestures betrayed the weakness at the root. And now, when he was thus
surprisingly received in that library of Mittwalden Palace, which was
the customary haunt of silence, his hands went up into the air as if he
had been shot, and he cried aloud with the scream of an old woman.

"O!" he gasped, recovering, "your Highness! I beg ten thousand pardons.
But your Highness at such an hour in the library!--a circumstance so
unusual as your Highness's presence was a thing I could not be expected
to foresee."

"There is no harm done, Herr Cancellarius," said Otto.