I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that two of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the betrothal of one of them to an Englishman.  The turn of the tide had come to him.  And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I have to speak of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of the autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be his duty to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so many of our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible offence when the occasion for continuing it draws to a close.  The pleasant narrator in the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not the philosopher who has come to know himself and his relations toward the universe.  The words of this last are one to twenty; his mind is bent upon the causes of events rather than their progress.  As you see me on the page now, I stand somewhere between the two, approximating to the former, but with sufficient of the latter within me to tame the delightful expansiveness proper to that coming hour of marriage-bells and bridal-wreaths.  It is a sign that the end, and the delivery of reader and writer alike, should not be dallied with.

The princess had invited Lucy Heddon to Sarkeld to meet Temple, and Temple to meet me.  Onward I flew.  I saw the old woods of the lake-palace, and, as it were, the light of my past passion waning above them.  I was greeted by the lady of all nobility with her gracious warmth, and in his usual abrupt manful fashion by Prince Hermann.  And I had no time to reflect on the strangeness of my stepping freely under the roof where a husband claimed Ottilia, before she led me into the library, where sat my lost and recovered, my darling; and, unlike herself, for a moment, she faltered in rising and breathing my name.

We were alone.  I knew she was no bondwoman.  The question how it had come to pass lurked behind everything I said and did; speculation on the visible features, and touching of the unfettered hand, restrained me from uttering or caring to utter it.  But it was wonderful.  It thrust me back on Providence again for the explanation—­humbly this time.  It was wonderful and blessed, as to loving eyes the first-drawn breath of a drowned creature restored to life.  I kissed her hand.  ’Wait till you have heard everything, Harry,’ she said, and her voice was deeper, softer, exquisitely strange in its known tones, as her manner was, and her eyes.  She was not the blooming, straight-shouldered, high-breathing girl of other days, but sister to the day of her ‘Good-bye, Harry,’ pale and worn.  The eyes had wept.  This was Janet, haply widowed.  She wore no garb nor a shade of widowhood.  Perhaps she had thrown it off, not to offend an implacable temper in me.  I said, ’I shall hear nothing that can make you other than my own Janet—­if you will?’