do this, and nothing else:  you can apologize, recognize your station, repair a degree of mischief that I will not say was preconceived or plotted.  So for awhile pursue your studies, your travels.  In time it will give me pleasure to receive you.  Mr. Richmond,’ he added, smiling and rising; ’even the head of a little German principality has to give numberless audiences.’  His features took a more cordial smile to convince me that the dismissing sentence was merely playful.

As for me, my mind was confused by the visible fact that the father’s features resembled the daughter’s.  I mention it, that my mind’s condition may be understood.

Hardly had I been bowed out of the room when my father embraced me, and some minutes later I heard Prince Otto talking to me and demanding answers.  That he or any one else should have hostile sentiments toward a poor devil like me seemed strange.  My gift of the horse appeared to anger him most.  I reached the chateau without once looking back, a dispirited wretch.  I shut myself up; I tried to read.  The singular brevity of my interview with the prince, from which I had expected great if not favourable issues, affected me as though I had been struck by a cannon shot; my brains were nowhere.  His perfect courtesy was confounding.  I was tormented by the delusion that I had behaved pusillanimously.

My father rushed up to me after dark.  Embracing me and holding me by the hand, he congratulated me with his whole heart.  The desire of his life was accomplished; the thing he had plotted for ages had come to pass.  He praised me infinitely.  My glorious future, he said, was to carry a princess to England and sit among the, highest there, the husband of a lady peerless in beauty and in birth, who, in addition to what she was able to do for me by way of elevation in my country, could ennoble in her own territory.  I had the option of being the father of English nobles or of German princes; so forth.  I did not like the strain; yet I clung to him.  I was compelled to ask whether he had news of any sort worth hearing.

‘None,’ said he calmly; ’none.  I have everything to hear, nothing to relate; and, happily, I can hardly speak for joy.’  He wept.

He guaranteed to have the margravine at the chateau within a week, which seemed to me a sufficient miracle.  The prince, he said, might require three months of discretionary treatment.  Three further months to bring the family round, and the princess would be mine.  ’But she is yours! she is yours already!’ he cried authoritatively.  ’She is the reigning intellect there.  I dreaded her very intellect would give us all the trouble, and behold, it is our ally!  The prince lives with an elbow out of his income.  But for me it would be other parts of his person as well, I assure you, and the world would see such a princely tatterdemalion as would astonish it.  Money to him is important.  He must carry on his mine.  He can carry on nothing without my help.  By the way, we have to deal out cheques?’