marking:

"Of course, I shall discuss the matter with the Prince."

Again Victoria rushed to the fray.

"You mean that it's not our business?" she asked with a toss of her
head.

I was goaded beyond endurance, and it was not their business. Princess
Heinrich might find some excuse in her familiarity with public affairs,
Victoria at least could urge no such plea.

"I am always glad of my mother's advice, Victoria," said I, and with a
bow I left them. As I went out I heard Victoria cry, "It's all that
hateful woman!"

Naturally the thing appeared to me then in a different light from that
in which I can see it now. I can not now think that my mother and sister
were wrong to be anxious, disturbed, alarmed, even angry with the lady
who occasioned them such discomfort. A young man under the influence of
an older woman is no doubt a legitimate occasion for the fears and
efforts of his female relatives. I have recorded what they said not in
protest against their feelings, but to show the singularly unfortunate
manner in which they made what they felt manifest; my object is not to
blame what was probably inevitable in them, but to show how they
overreached themselves and became not a drag on my infatuation, as they
hoped, but rather a spur that incited my passion to a quicker course.

That spur I did not need. She seemed to stand before me still as I had
left her, with my kiss fresh on her cheeks, and on her lips that
strange, nervous, helpless laugh, the laugh that admitted a folly she
could not conquer, expressed a shame that burned her even while she
braved it, and owned a love so compact of this folly and this shame that
its joy seemed all one with their bitterness. But to my younger heart
and hotter man's blood the folly and shame were now beaten down by the
joy; it freed itself from them and soared up into my heart on a
liberated and triumphant wing. I had achieved this thing--I, the boy
they laughed at and tried to rule. She herself had laughed at me. She
laughed thus no more. When I kissed her she had not called me Caesar; she
had found no utterance save in that laugh, and the message of that laugh
was surrender.

CHAPTER XI.

AN ACT OF ABDICATION.

The night brought me little rest and no wisdom. As though its own
strength were not enough, my passion sought and found an ally in a
defiant obstinacy, which now made me desirous of doing what the Countess
asked for its own sake as well as for hers. Being