was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on me with the
force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the
little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me
back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well. It
cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.

I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to
pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that two
of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the betrothal
of one of them to an Englishman. The turn of the tide had come to him.
And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I have to speak
of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of the
autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be his duty
to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so many of
our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible offence when
the occasion for continuing it draws to a close. The pleasant narrator in
the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not the philosopher who has
come to know himself and his relations toward the universe. The words of
this last are one to twenty; his mind is bent upon the causes of events
rather than their progress. As you see me on the page now, I stand
somewhere between the two, approximating to the former, but with
sufficient of the latter within me to tame the delightful expansiveness
proper to that coming hour of marriage-bells and bridal-wreaths. It is a
sign that the end, and the delivery of reader and writer alike, should
not be dallied with.

The princess had invited Lucy Heddon to Sarkeld to meet Temple, and
Temple to meet me. Onward I flew. I saw the old woods of the lake-palace,
and, as it were, the light of my past passion waning above them. I was
greeted by the lady of all nobility with her gracious warmth, and in his
usual abrupt manful fashion by Prince Hermann. And I had no time to
reflect on the strangeness of my stepping freely under the roof where a
husband claimed Ottilia, before she led me into the library, where sat my
lost and recovered, my darling; and, unlike herself, for a moment, she
faltered in rising and breathing my name.

We were alone. I knew she was no bondwoman. The question how it had come
to pass lurked behind everything I said and did; speculation on the
visible features, and touching of the unfettered hand, res