ould be roused somehow.
He's so young.' But they could find nothing to rouse him with. And the
old princess, wiping her eyes, wished in her heart he were young enough
to come and cry at her knee.

"In time Prince Roman, making an effort, would join now and again the
family circle. But it was as if his heart and his mind had been buried
in the family vault with the wife he had lost. He took to wandering in
the woods with a gun, watched over secretly by one of the keepers, who
would report in the evening that 'His Serenity has never fired a shot
all day.' Sometimes walking to the stables in the morning he would order
in subdued tones a horse to be saddled, wait switching his boot till it
was led up to him, then mount without a word and ride out of the gates
at a walking pace. He would be gone all day. People saw him on the
roads looking neither to the right nor to the left, white-faced, sitting
rigidly in the saddle like a horseman of stone on a living mount.

"The peasants working in the fields, the great unhedged fields, looked
after him from the distance; and sometimes some sympathetic old woman on
the threshold of a low, thatched hut was moved to make the sign of the
cross in the air behind his back; as though he were one of themselves, a
simple village soul struck by a sore affliction.

"He rode looking straight ahead seeing no one as if the earth were empty
and all mankind buried in that grave which had opened so suddenly in
his path to swallow up his happiness. What were men to him with their
sorrows, joys, labours and passions from which she who had been all the
world to him had been cut off so early?

"They did not exist; and he would have felt as completely lonely and
abandoned as a man in the toils of a cruel nightmare if it had not been
for this countryside where he had been born and had spent his happy
boyish years. He knew it well--every slight rise crowned with trees
amongst the ploughed fields, every dell concealing a village. The dammed
streams made a chain of lakes set in the green meadows. Far away to the
north the great Lithuanian forest faced the sun, no higher than a hedge;
and to the south, the way to the plains, the vast brown spaces of the
earth touched the blue sky.

"And this familiar landscape associated with the days without thought
and without sorrow, this land the charm of which he felt without even
looking at it soothed his pain, like the presence of an old friend who
sits silent and d