CHAPTER IV
"YOU ARE HEAD OF THE HOUSE NOW"
My chief feeling as I rose to receive the Prince's daughter was a sort of shamefaced regret that I had allowed myself to be hurried into a position which made it necessary for me to mislead her. I meant her nothing but good. I had been brought to the castle all against my will. I had stayed there largely in order that I might be the means of saving her from danger; and everything I heard only served to increase that danger in my view. Yet the fact of the deception I was practising hampered and embarrassed me in her presence.
She was garbed now in the deepest black, was pale and hollow-eyed, and trembling under the stress of her new sudden sorrow; and she seemed so frail and fragile that my heart ached for her, while my senses were thrilled by her exquisite beauty and by a strange subtle influence which her presence exercised upon me. My pulses beat fast with a tumultuous desire to help her in her helplessness. Never, indeed, had woman moved me like this.
She paused a moment on the threshold, her hand on the arm of an elderly lady who accompanied her; and her large blue eyes rested on my face, searching, reading, and appealing, as I hastened across the room toward her. Her scrutiny appeared to give her confidence, for she withdrew her hand from her companion's arm and held it out to greet me.
"I felt I must come to bid you welcome, cousin," she said in a low, sweet voice that trembled. "You are welcome—very welcome."
I took the hand and raised it to my lips.
"You should not have distressed yourself to come; I should have understood," I answered.
"I felt that I must see you," she said, very graciously; and I, remembering what I had seen in the garden and all that von Krugen had told me, knew well enough the doubts and fears, anxieties and hopes, that might lie behind the words.