s him. Then
he pouted like a sulky child and said:

"I cannot say that your highness is very grateful for the hospitality
which I have offered you...."

Othomar smiled painfully and gave him his hand....

"Or that it is kind of your highness to threaten me to-day with your
displeasure," Dutri continued.

"I know you, Dutri," the prince said in his ear. "I know your tongue.
That's my only reason for warning you.... And now, for God's sake, say
no more about this, for it ... it all gives me pain...."

Dutri was silent, thought him a child and a prince in one. He shrugged
his shoulders silently at Othomar's incomparable innocence, but he
shuddered when he thought of a possible disgrace. He had no fortune; his
position with the crown-prince was his life, his ambition, his all, for
now and for later, when the prince should be emperor!... How pleased he
had been at first that Alexa had told him everything, that he knew a
secret of his prince, who never seemed to have any secrets! A vague
pleasure that this secret would give him a power over his future emperor
had already flitted through his head, full of frivolous calculations.
And now the prince was threatening him and that power was frustrated at
its very inception! And Dutri was now almost sorry that he had learned
this secret; he even feared that the emperor might come to hear of it,
that he would be visited with the father's displeasure even before the
son's....

"If only Alexa had not dragged me into it!" he complained to himself,
with his shallow fickleness of thought.

But, although Dutri was silent and even contradicted the rumour, the
crown-prince's _liaison_ was discussed, possibly only because of Alexa's
triumphant glances whenever Othomar addressed a word to her at a
reception, at a ball. Nevertheless, Dutri's contradiction introduced a
certain confusion--for he was known as a ready blabber--and people did
not know what to think or what to believe.

But Othomar did not feel happy in his love. The fierce passion of this
woman with her fiery glances, who overpowered him one moment with her
kisses and the next crept before him like a slave and crouched at his
feet in humility before her future sovereign, at first astonished him
and, in one or two of his fits of despair, carried him away, but in the
long run aroused in him a feeling of disinclination and opposition. In
the young equerry's scented flat where they met--it was as dainty as any
young girl's sit