Ottilia danced with Prince Hermann at the grand Ball given in honour of him.  The wives and daughters of the notables present kept up a buzz of comment on his personal advantages, in which, I heard it said, you saw his German heart, though he had spent the best years of his life abroad.  Much court was paid to him by the men.  Sarkeld visibly expressed satisfaction.  One remark, ‘We shall have his museum in the town!’ left me no doubt upon the presumed object of his visit:  it was uttered and responded to with a depth of sentiment that showed how lively would be the general gratitude toward one who should exhilarate the place by introducing cases of fish-bones.

So little did he think of my presence, that returning from a ride one day, he seized and detained the princess’s hand.  She frowned with pained surprise, but unresistingly, as became a young gentlewoman’s dignity.  Her hand was rudely caught and kept in the manner of a boisterous wooer—­ a Harry the Fifth or lusty Petruchio.  She pushed her horse on at a bound.  Prince Hermann rode up head to head with her gallantly, having now both hands free of the reins, like an Indian spearing the buffalo—­ it was buffalo courtship; and his shout of rallying astonishment at her resistance, ‘What?  What?’ rang wildly to heighten the scene, she leaning constrained on one side and he bending half his body’s length; a strange scene for me to witness.

They proceeded with old Schwartz at their heels doglike.  It became a question for me whether I should follow in the bitter track, and further the question whether I could let them escape from sight.  They wound up the roadway, two figures and one following, now dots against the sky, now a single movement in the valley, now concealed, buried under billows of forest, making the low noising of the leaves an intolerable whisper of secresy, and forward I rushed again to see them rounding a belt of firs or shadowed by rocks, solitary on shorn fields, once more dipping to the forest, and once more emerging, vanishing.  When I had grown sure of their reappearance from some point of view or other, I spied for them in vain.  My destiny, whatever it might be, fluttered over them; to see them seemed near the knowing of it, and not to see them, deadly.  I galloped, so intent on the three in the distance, that I did not observe a horseman face toward me, on the road:  it was Prince Hermann.  He raised his hat; I stopped short, and he spoke: 

’Mr. Richmond, permit me to apologize to you.  I have to congratulate you, it appears.  I was not aware.—­However, the princess has done me the favour to enlighten me.  How you will manage, I can’t guess, but that is not my affair.  I am a man of honour; and, on my honour, I conceived that I was invited here to decide, as my habit is, on the spot, if I would, or if I would not.  I speak clearly to you, no doubt.  There could be no hesitation in the mind of a man of sense.  My way is prompt and blunt; I am sorry I gave you