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 occasion to reflect on it.  There!  I have been deceived—­deceived myself, let’s say.  Sharp methods play the devil with you now and then.  To speak the truth,—­perhaps you won’t care to listen to it,—­family arrangements are the best; take my word for it, they are the best.  And in the case of princesses of the Blood!—­Why, look you, I happen to be suitable.  It ’s a matter of chance, like your height, complexion, constitution.  One is just what one is born to be, eh?  You have your English notions, I my German; but as a man of the world in the bargain, and “gentleman,” I hope, I should say, that to take a young princess’s fancy, and drag her from her station is not—­of course, you know that the actual value of the title goes if she steps down?  Very well.  But enough said; I thought I was in a clear field.  We are used to having our way cleared for us, nous autres.  I will not detain you.’