The hour which brought me to Ottilia was noon.  The arrangements of the ladies could only grant me thirty minutes, for Janet was to drive the princess out into the country to view the island.  She and my aunt Dorothy had been already introduced.  Miss Goodwin, after presenting them, insisted upon ceremoniously accompanying me to the house.  Quite taking the vulgar view of a proceeding such as the princess had been guilty of, and perhaps fearing summary audacity and interestedness in the son of a father like mine, she ventured on lecturing me, as though it lay with me to restrain the fair romantic head, forbear from calling up my special advantages, advise, and stand to the wisdom of this world, and be the man of honour.  The princess had said:  ‘Not see him when I have come to him?’ I reassured my undiscerning friend partly, not wholly.

’Would it be commonly sensible or civil, to refuse to see me, having come?’

Miss Goodwin doubted.

I could indicate forcibly, because I felt, the clear-judging brain and tempered self-command whereby Ottilia had gained her decision.

Miss Goodwin nodded and gave me the still-born affirmative of politeness.  Her English mind expressed itself willing to have exonerated the rash great lady for visiting a dying lover, but he was not the same person now that he was on his feet, consequently her expedition wore a different aspect:—­my not dying condemned her.  She entreated me to keep the fact of the princess’s arrival unknown to my father, on which point we were one.  Intensely enthusiastic for the men of her race, she would have me, above all things, by a form of adjuration designed to be a masterpiece of persuasive rhetoric, ‘prove myself an Englishman.’  I was to show that ’the honour, interests, reputation and position of any lady (demented or not,’ she added) ‘were as precious to me as to the owner’:  that ’no woman was ever in peril of a shadow of loss in the hands of an English gentleman,’ and so forth, rather surprisingly to me, remembering her off-hand manner of the foregoing day.  But the sense of responsibility thrown upon her ideas of our superior national dignity had awakened her fervider naturalness—­made her a different person, as we say when accounting, in our fashion, for what a little added heat may do.

The half hour allotted to me fled.  I went from the room and the house, feeling that I had seen and heard her who was barely of the world of humankind for me, so strongly did imagination fly with her.  I kissed her fingers, I gazed in her eyes, I heard the beloved voice.  All passed too swift for happiness.  Recollections set me throbbing, but recollection brought longing.  She said, ‘Now I have come I must see you, Harry.’  Did it signify that to see me was a piece of kindness at war with her judgement?  She rejoiced at my perfect recovery, though it robbed her of the plea in extenuation of this step she had taken.  She praised me for abstaining to write to her, when I was stammering a set of hastily-impressed reasons to excuse myself for the omission.  She praised my step into Parliament.  It did not seem to involve a nearer approach to her.  She said, ‘You have not wasted your time in England.’  It was for my solitary interests that she cared, then.