The morning was sultry with the first rising of the sun.  I knew that Ottilia and Janet would be out.  For myself, I dared not leave the house.  I sat in my room, harried by the most penetrating snore which can ever have afflicted wakeful ears.  It proclaimed so deep-seated a peacefulness in the bosom of the disturber, and was so arrogant, so ludicrous, and inaccessible to remonstrance, that it sounded like a renewal of our midnight altercation on the sleeper’s part.  Prolonged now and then beyond all bounds, it ended in the crashing blare whereof utter wakefulness cannot imagine honest sleep to be capable, but a playful melody twirled back to the regular note.  He was fast asleep on the sitting-room sofa, while I walked fretting and panting.  To this twinship I seemed condemned.  In my heart nevertheless there was a reserve of wonderment at his apparent astuteness and resolution, and my old love for him whispered disbelief in his having disgraced me.  Perhaps it was wilful self-deception.  It helped me to meet him with a better face.

We both avoided the subject of our difference for some time:  he would evidently have done so altogether, and used his best and sweetest manner to divert me:  but when I struck on it, asking him if he had indeed told me the truth last night, his features clouded as though with an effort of patience.  To my consternation, he suddenly broke away, with his arms up, puffing and stammering, stamping his feet.  He would have a truce—­he insisted on a truce, I understood him to exclaim, and that I was like a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master.  He raved of the gallant down-rightedness of the young bloods of his day, and how splendidly this one and that had compassed their ends by winning great ladies, lawfully, or otherwise.  For several minutes he was in a state of frenzy, appealing to his pattern youths of a bygone generation, as to moral principles—­stuttering, and of a dark red hue from the neck to the temples.  I refrained from a scuffle of tongues.  Nor did he excuse himself after he had cooled.  His hand touched instinctively for his pulse, and, with a glance at the ceiling, he exclaimed, ‘Good Lord!’ and brought me to his side.  ‘These wigwam houses check my circulation,’ said he.  ’Let us go out-let us breakfast on board.’

The open air restored him, and he told me that he had been merely oppressed by the architect of the inferior classes, whose ceiling sat on his head.  My nerves, he remarked to me, were very exciteable.  ’You should take your wine, Richie,—­you require it.  Your dear mother had a low-toned nervous system.’  I was silent, and followed him, at once a captive and a keeper.

This day of slackened sails and a bright sleeping water kept the yachtsmen on land; there was a crowd to meet the morning boat.  Foremost among those who stepped out of it was the yellow-haired Eckart, little suspecting what the sight of him signalled to me.  I could scarcely greet him at all, for in him I perceived that my father had fully committed himself to his plot, and left me nothing to hope.  Eckart said something of Prince Hermann.  As we were walking off the pier, I saw Janet conversing with Prince Ernest, and the next minute Hermann himself was one of the group.  I turned to Eckart for an explanation.