The annoyance for me was that I could not detach myself from a contemplation of these various scenes, by reverting to my life in Germany.  The preposterous closing of my interview with Ottilia blocked the way, and I was unable to write to her—­unable to address her even in imagination, without pangs of shame at the review of the petty conspiracy I had sanctioned to entrap her to plight her hand to me, and without perpetually multiplying excuses for my conduct.  So to escape them I was reduced to study Janet, forming one of her satellites.  She could say to me impudently, with all the air of a friendly comrade, ’Had your letter from Germany yet, Harry?’ She flew—­she was always on the chase.  I saw her permit Heriot to kiss her hand, and then the squire appeared, and Heriot and she burst into laughter, and the squire, with a puzzled face, would have the game explained to him, but understood not a bit of it, only growled at me; upon which Janet became serious and chid him.  I was told by my aunt Dorothy to admire this behaviour of hers.  One day she certainly did me a service:  a paragraph in one of the newspapers spoke of my father, not flatteringly:  ‘Richmond is in the field again,’ it commenced.  The squire was waiting for her to hand the paper to him.  None of us could comprehend why she played him off and denied him his right to the first perusal of the news; she was voluble, almost witty, full of sprightly Roxalana petulance.

‘This paper,’ she said, ‘deserves to be burnt,’ and she was allowed to burn it—­money article, mining column as well—­on the pretext of an infamous anti-Tory leader, of which she herself composed the first sentence to shock the squire completely.  I had sight of that paper some time afterwards.  Richmond was in the field again, it stated, with mock flourishes.  But that was not the worst.  My grandfather’s name was down there, and mine, and Princess Ottilia’s.  My father’s connection with the court of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld was alluded to as the latest, and next to his winning the heiress of Riversley, the most successful of his ventures, inasmuch as his son, if rumour was to be trusted, had obtained the promise of the hand of the princess.  The paragraph was an excerpt from a gossiping weekly journal, perhaps less malevolent than I thought it.  There was some fun to be got out of a man who, the journal in question was informed, had joined the arms of England and a petty German principality stamped on his plate and furniture.

My gratitude to Janet was fervent enough when I saw what she had saved me from.  I pressed her hand and held it.  I talked stupidly, but I made my cruel position intelligible to her, and she had the delicacy, on this occasion, to keep her sentiments regarding my father unuttered.  We sat hardly less than an hour side by side—­I know not how long hand in hand.  The end was an extraordinary trembling in the limb abandoned to me.  It seized her frame.  I would have detained her, but it was