g more thinly through feebler veins, yet that blood was not so
impoverished that the delicacy of this future emperor need be ascribed
to racial exhaustion. Possibly Barzia's sudden affection for the prince
tinged this physiological diagnosis with excessive optimism; at any
rate, the professor had not the least fear of this fragility, or even of
this nervous weakness. What he did fear was lest those mental qualities
which had so suddenly endeared the prince to him should not be able to
maintain themselves during this period of fatigue and exhaustion.
Spontaneous, unreflected, uncalculated he knew those virtues to be in
the prince, as it were a treasure unknown to himself: would they be
lost, now, in these mournful days, or would they remain, perhaps
develop, become more and more refined, make up to Othomar in moral
strength for what he lacked in physical strength and in this way cure
him? For the professor knew it: these qualities alone could effect a
cure....

Othomar himself thought neither of his virtues nor of his blood: he
thought of his future and thought of it with an hourly-increasing dread.
When the empress asked Barzia whether this rest would be good for the
prince and whether distraction would not be better, the professor
declared that the prince had had plenty of distraction lately. He must
first get over his fatigue, get over it entirely; it mattered less with
what the prince kept his brain occupied for the moment....

But Barzia did not mean this altogether and would doubtless have been
very far from meaning it at all, had he known of what the prince was
thinking, or been fully able to judge his utter lack of mental
elasticity.

And the days passed by. Othomar did not mention his resolution to the
empress again, desiring to give her as little pain as possible; neither
did the empress allude to it: she hoped on.

But in Othomar's meditations it revolved incessantly, like a wheel: he
was able to do nothing for his people and yet he loved them; he did not
know how to govern them, he would abdicate his rights and his title of
crown-prince: Berengar should become Duke of Xara....

The small prince came and paid his brother a short visit every morning;
he always wore his little uniform, looking like a sturdy little general
in miniature, and Othomar watched him with a smile.

Was there no wish to rule in the boy's medieval little brain, was there
no jealousy in his passionate little heart? Othomar remembered