to offer him entertainment. He graciously deigns to accept a
couple of English hunters at our hands; we shall improve his breed of
horses, I suspect. Now, Richie, have I done well? I flatter myself I have
been attentive to your interests, have I not?'

He hung waiting for confidential communications on my part, but did not
press for them; he preserved an unvarying delicacy in that respect.

'You have nothing to tell?' he asked.

'Nothing,' I said. 'I have only to thank you.'

He left me. At no other period of our lives were we so disunited. I felt
in myself the reverse of everything I perceived in him, and such letters
as I wrote to the squire consequently had a homelier tone. It seems that
I wrote of the pleasures of simple living--of living for learning's sake.
Mr. Peterborough at the same time despatched praises of my sobriety of
behaviour and diligent studiousness, confessing that I began to outstrip
him in some of the higher branches. The squire's brief reply breathed
satisfaction, but too evidently on the point where he had been led to
misconceive the state of affairs. 'He wanted to have me near him, as did
another person, whom I appeared to be forgetting; he granted me another
year's leave of absence, bidding me bluffly not to be a bookworm and
forget I was an Englishman.' The idea that I was deceiving him never
entered my mind.

I was deceiving everybody, myself in the bargain, as a man must do when
in chase of a woman above him in rank. The chase necessitates deceit--who
knows? chicanery of a sort as well; it brings inevitable humiliations;
such that ever since the commencement of it at speed I could barely think
of my father with comfort, and rarely met him with pleasure. With what
manner of face could I go before the prince or the margravine, and say, I
am an English commoner, the son of a man of doubtful birth, and I claim
the hand of the princess? What contortions were not in store for these
features of mine! Even as affairs stood now, could I make a confidant of
Temple and let him see me through the stages of the adventure? My
jingling of verses, my fretting about the signification of flowers, and
trifling with symbols, haunted me excrutiatingly, taunting me with I know
not what abject vileness of spirit.

In the midst of these tortures an arrow struck me, in the shape of an
anonymous letter, containing one brief line: 'The princess is in need of
help.'

I threw my books aside, and repaired to Count