t prominent and attractive qualities. He was undoubtedly old for his
young years: any one who did not know better would have given him more
than his twenty-three years, now that he was allowing his crisp beard to
grow.... And yet, yet, especially in these troubled days, his old fears
would often well up within him and he would remain sitting alone for
minutes at a time, staring at a vague point in his room, listening to
the murmurs of the future, as he had listened in that haunting night
among his forefathers at Castel Vaza. He then felt that, suddenly, as
with a garment, all his new resignation in life was slipping from him,
falling from his shoulders. But he had learnt so to govern himself that
nobody, not his father, not his mother, not even the crown-princess,
noticed anything of this mental dizziness, which left him ice-cold in
his short periods of solitude, doubting his right, full of strange, soft
compassion for his people....

It was, actually, the old illness which thus, periodically, seethed in
him again like an evil sap, flowing through his veins, enfeebling his
nerves, crushing him internally, as though he would never be cured of
it. But he grew accustomed to it, no longer felt despair because of it,
even knew, during the few minutes that the malady lasted, that it would
pass and afterwards regained that sense of harmony which above all
constituted his resignation.

It was in these days of silent fermentation that there was talk of a
marriage between Princess Thera and the Prince of Naples; nothing was
yet decided between the two families, but the young prince was invited
to Lipara to attend the great autumn manoeuvres. Shoots were arranged;
different festivities followed one upon the other. Othomar had in these
days to combat those sudden weaknesses more than ever: a strange
feeling, a shivering, a mysterious terror remained with him and no
longer left him, a terror which he dared not analyse, for fear of
discovering motives which would cause him to lose his calmness entirely.
There revived within him the recollection of the fact that shortly after
his marriage he had dreamt a dream more or less similar to his former
dream: the sinister capital filling with crape. It happened while he was
still residing with his young wife at Castel Zanthos and he had attached
no importance to it, because he considered that this second dream was
only a shadow of the former one, only the remembrance of what had
already happ