What first entered my brain as the wildest possibility grew rapidly to a desire which possessed my whole being with absolute passion. The situation was in itself so singular and tantalising, and the Princess was so beautiful a woman, to be on these terms of delicious intimacy with the daughter of one of Europe’s sovereigns (a little sovereign it is true, but great by race and connection), to meet her constantly in absolute defiance of all the laws of etiquette, yet to see her wear through it all as unapproachable a dignity, as serene an aspect of condescension, as though she were presiding at her father’s Court—it was enough, surely, to have turned the head of a wiser man than myself!
It was not long before Mademoiselle Ottilie, the lady-in-waiting, discovered the secret madness of my thoughts—in the light of what has since occurred I can truly call it so. And she it was who, for purposes of her own, shovelled coals on the fire and fanned the flame. One way or another, generally on her initiative, but always by her arrangement, we three met, and met daily.
On the evening of a day passed in their company, with the impression strong upon me of the Princess’s farewell look, which had held, I fancied, something different to its wont; with the knowledge that I had, unrebuked, pressed and kissed that fair hand after a fashion more daring than respectful, with my blood in a fever and my brain in a whirl, now seeming sure of success, now coldly awake to my folly, I bethought me of taking counsel again with my great-uncle’s pedigree. And heartened by the proofs that the blood of Jennico was good enough for any alliance, I fell to completing the document by bringing it up to date as far as concerned myself. Now, when I in goodly black letters had set down my own cognomen so fair upon the parchment, I was further seized with the fancy to fill in the space left blank for my future marriage; and I lightly traced in pencil, opposite the words “Basil Jennico, Lord of Tollendhal,” the full titles and names, which by this time I had studied till I knew them off by heart, of her Serene Highness the Princess Marie Caroline Dorothée Josephine Charlotte Ottilie of Lausitz.
It made such a pretty show after all that had gone before, and it brought such visions with it of the glories the name of Jennico might yet rise to, that I could not find it in me to erase it again, and so left it as it stood, telling myself, as I rolled up the great deed again and hooked it in its place beneath my uncle’s portrait, that it would not be my fault if the glorious entry did not remain there for ever.
The next time the ladies visited me, Mademoiselle Ottilie—flitting like a little curious brown moth about the great room, dancing pirouettes beneath my uncle’s portrait, and now and again pausing to make a comical grimace at his forbidding countenance, while I entertained her mistress at its further end—must needs be pricked by the desire to study the important document, which I had, as I have said, already submitted to her view.
Struck by her sudden silence and stillness, I rose and crossed the room to find her with the parchment rolled out before her, absorbed in contemplation, her elbows on the table, her face leaning on her hands. With a fierce rush of blood to my cheeks, in a confusion that set every pulse throbbing, I attempted to withdraw from her the evidence of what must seem the most impudent delusion. But she held tight with her elbows, and then, disregarding my muttered explanation that I intended to rub out at once the nonsense I had written in a moment of idleness, she laid her small finger upon the place, and, looking at me gravely, said:
“Why not?”
The whole room whirled round with me.
“My God,” I cried, “don’t mock me!”
But she, with a new ring of feeling in her voice, said earnestly: