‘It occurred,’ said I, feeling my strength ebb and despair set in, ’it occurred—­the prince compelled me to the meet him.’

’But my cousin Otto is no assassin?

’Compelled, I say:  that is, he conceived I had injured him, and left me no other way of making amends.’

Her defence of Otto was in reality the vehement cherishing of her idea of me.  This caused her bewilderment, and like a barrier to the flowing of her mind it resisted and resisted.  She could not suffer herself to realize that I was one of the brainless young savages, creatures with claws and fangs.

Her face was unchanged to me.  The homeliness of her large mild eyes embraced me unshadowed, and took me to its inner fire unreservedly.  Leaning in my roomy chair, I contemplated her at leisure while my heart kept saying ‘Mine! mine!’ to awaken an active belief in its possession.  Her face was like the quiet morning of a winter day when cloud and sun intermix and make an ardent silver, with lights of blue and faint fresh rose; and over them the beautiful fold of her full eyebrow on the eyelid like a bending upper heaven.  Those winter mornings are divine.  They move on noiselessly.  The earth is still, as if awaiting.  A wren warbles, and flits through the lank drenched brambles; hill-side opens green; elsewhere is mist, everywhere expectancy.  They bear the veiled sun like a sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of stainless cloud.

She was as fair.  Gazing across her shoulder’s gentle depression, I could have desired to have the couchant brow, and round cheek, and rounding chin no more than a young man’s dream of woman, a picture alive, without the animating individual awful mind to judge of me by my acts.  I chafed at the thought that one so young and lovely should meditate on human affairs at all.  She was of an age to be maidenly romantic:  our situation favoured it.  But she turned to me, and I was glad of the eyes I knew.  She kissed me on the forehead.

‘Sleep,’ she whispered.

I feigned sleep to catch my happiness about me.

Some disenchanting thunder was coming, I was sure, and I was right.  My father entered.

‘Princess!’ He did amazed and delighted homage, and forthwith uncontrollably poured out the history of my heroism, a hundred words for one;—­my promptitude in picking the prince’s glove up on my sword’s point, my fine play with the steel, my scornful magnanimity, the admiration of my fellow-students;—­every line of it; in stupendous language; an artillery celebration of victory.  I tried to stop him.  Ottilia rose, continually assenting, with short affirmatives, to his glorifying interrogations—­a method he had of recapitulating the main points.  She glanced to right and left, as if she felt caged.

‘Is it known?’ I heard her ask, in the half audible strange voice which had previously made me tremble.

’Known?  I certify to you, princess,’—­the unhappy man spouted his withering fountain of interjections over us anew; known in every Court and garrison of Germany!  Known by this time in Old England!  And, what was more, the correct version of it was known!  It was known that the young Englishman had vanquished his adversary with the small sword, and had allowed him, because he had raged demoniacally on account of his lamed limb, to have a shot in revenge.