In reality the busy little creature within me, whom we call self, was digging pits for comfort to flow in, of any kind, in any form; and it seized on every idea, every circumstance, to turn it to that purpose, and with such success, that when by-and-by I learnt how entirely inactive special Providence had been in my affairs, I had to collect myself before I could muster the conception of gratitude toward the noble woman who clothed me in the illusion.  It was to the Princess Ottilia, acting through Count Kesensky, that I owed both my wafting away from England at a wretched season, and that chance of a career in Parliament!  The captain of the Verona hinted as much when, after a year of voyaging, we touched at an East Indian seaport, and von Redwitz joined the vessel to resume the post I was occupying.  Von Redwitz (the son of Prince Ernest’s Chancellor, I discovered) could have told me more than he did, but he handed me a letter from the princess, calling me home urgently, and even prescribing my route, and bidding me come straight to Germany and to Sarkeld.  The summons was distasteful, for I had settled into harness under my scientific superiors, and had proved to my messmates that I was neither morose nor over-conceited.  Captain Martinitz persuaded me to return, and besides, there lay between the lines of Ottilia’s letter a signification of welcome things better guessed at than known.  Was I not bound to do her bidding?  Others had done it:  young von Redwitz, for instance, in obeying the telegraph wires and feigning sickness to surrender his place to me, when she wished to save me from misery by hurrying me to new scenes with a task for my hand and head;—­no mean stretch of devotion on his part.  Ottilia was still my princess; she my providence.  She wrote: 

’Come home, my friend Harry:  you have been absent too long.  He who intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel, and you nearer home.  The home is always here where I am, but it may now take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now really loss of life.  I tell you no more.  You know me, that when I say come, it is enough.’

A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter.  Not a word of Prince Hermann.  What had happened?  I guessed at it curiously and incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope as soon as I seemed to have divined it.  I did not wrong my soul’s high mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in perplexity struck at impossibilities.  Ottilia would never have summoned me to herself.  But was Janet free?  The hope which refused to live in that other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the bare thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset it.  Had my girl’s courage failed, to spare her at the last moment?  I fancied it might be:  I was sure it was not so.  Yet the doubt pressed on me with the force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well.  It cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.