e sea to
travel over the whole Continent until you should find him, did you not?
What is hard to understand, is your father's not writing to you while he
did us the favour to reside at the palace.'

'Roy is a butterfly,' said the margravine.

'That I cannot think.'

'Roy was busy, he was occupied. I won't have him abused. Besides, one
can't be always caressing and cajoling one's pretty brats.'

'He is an intensely loving father.'

'Very well; establish that, and what does it matter whether he wrote or
not? A good reputation is the best vindication.'

The princess smiled. 'See here, dearest aunty, the two boys passed half
the night here, until my Aennchen's father gave them shelter.'

'Apparently he passes half or all the night in the open air everywhere,'
said the margravine.

I glanced hurriedly over both faces. The margravine was snuffing her
nostrils up contemptuously. The princess had vividly reddened. Her face
was luminous over the nest of white fur folding her neck.

'Yes, I must have the taste for it: for when I was a child,' said
I, plunging at anything to catch a careless topic, 'I was out in my
father's arms through a winter night, and I still look back on it as one
of the most delightful I have ever known. I wish I could describe
the effect it had on me. A track of blood in the snow could not be
brighter.'

The margravine repeated,

'A track of blood in the snow! My good young man, you have excited forms
of speech.'

I shuddered. Ottilia divined that her burning blush had involved me.
Divination is fiery in the season of blushes, and I, too, fell on the
track of her fair spirit, setting out from the transparent betrayal by
Schwartz of my night-watch in the pine-wood near the Traun river-falls.
My feelings were as if a wave had rolled me helpless to land, at the
margravine's mercy should she put another question. She startled us with
a loud outburst of laughter.

'No! no man upon this earth but Roy could have sat that horse I
don't know how many minutes by the clock, as a figure of bronze,' she
exclaimed.

Ottilia and I exchanged a grave look. The gentleness of the old time
was sweet to us both: but we had the wish that my father's extravagant
prominency in it might be forgotten.

At the dinner-table I made the acquaintance of the Herr Professor Dr.
Julius von Karsteg, tutor to the princess, a grey, broad-headed man,
whose chin remained imbedded in his neck-cloth when his eyelids were
rais