"What would you have me say?"
She gave him a quick glance, which set his pulses to throbbing wildly and sent the hot blood seething through his veins.
"Is your heart free, King Otto?"
A drear sense of desolation and loneliness came over the youth.
"Free," he replied almost inaudibly.
She gave a little, nervous laugh.
"But how know you that, surrounded by such loveliness, as that which you have this very night witnessed in my circle, your hour may not strike at last?"
Otto raised his eyes to those of the woman by his side.
"Fair lady, beautiful as Love's oracle itself, my heart is in little danger even from your fairest satellites. But mistake not my meaning. I am not insusceptible to the fever of the Gods! Love I have sought under all forms and guises! And if I found it not, if I have listened to its richest eloquence as to some song in a foreign tongue, which my heart understood not,—it is not that I have lacked the soul for love. Love I found not, though phantoms I have eagerly chased in this troubled dream of life. What avails it, to contend with one's destiny? And this is mine!"
Stephania laughed.