‘Ha! what is it? a snake? let me! let me !’ The guileless mistress replied, ‘A letter!’ Whereupon the maid said:  ’Not a window near! and no wall neither!  Why, dearest princess, we have walked up and down here a dozen times and not seen it staring at us!  Oh, my good heaven!’ The letter was seized and opened, and Ottilia read: 

’He who loves you with his heart has been cruelly used.  They have shot him.  He is not dead.  He must not die.  He is where he has studied since long.  He has his medicine and doctors, and they say the bullet did not lodge.  He has not the sight that cures.  Now is he, the strong young man, laid helpless at anybody’s mercy.’

She supped at her father’s table, and amused the margravine and him alternately with cards and a sonata.  Before twelve at midnight she was driving on the road to the University, saying farewell to what her mind reverenced, so that her lover might but have sight of her.  She imagined I had been assassinated.  For a long time, and most pertinaciously, this idea dwelt with her.  I could not dispossess her of it, even after uttering the word ‘duel’ I know not how often.  I had flatly to relate the whole-of the circumstances.

‘But Otto is no assassin,’ she cried out.

What was that she reverenced?  It was what she jeopardized—­her state, her rank, her dignity as princess and daughter of an ancient House, things typical to her of sovereign duties, and the high seclusion of her name.  To her the escapades of foolish damsels were abominable.  The laws of society as well as of her exalted station were in harmony with her intelligence.  She thought them good, but obeyed them as a subject, not slavishly:  she claimed the right to exercise her trained reason.  The modestest, humblest, sweetest of women, undervaluing nothing that she possessed, least of all what was due from her to others, she could go whithersoever her reason directed her, putting anything aside to act justly according to her light.  Nor would she have had cause to repent had I been the man she held me to be.  Even with me she had not behaved precipitately.  My course of probation was severe and long before she allowed her heart to speak.

Pale from a sleepless night and her heart’s weariful eagerness to be near me, she sat by my chair, holding my hand, and sometimes looking into my eyes to find the life reflecting hers as in a sunken well that has once been a spring.  My books and poor bachelor comforts caught her attention between-whiles.  We talked of the day of storm by the lake; we read the unsigned letter.  With her hand in mine I slept some minutes, and awoke grasping it, doubting and terrified, so great a wave of life lifted me up.

‘No! you are not gone,’ I sighed.

‘Only come,’ said she.

The nature of the step she had taken began to dawn on me.

‘But when they miss you at the palace?  Prince Ernest?’