S."]

"But you are at Strelsau now!" she cried with wonderful surprise.

"Ah, but I am no prince, madam!" said he.

"Can princes alone--forget in Strelsau?"

"How should a poor student dare to--forget in Strelsau?" And as he
spoke he made bold to step near her, and stood close, looking down
into her face. Without a word she turned and left him, going with a
step that seemed to dance through the meadow and yet led her to her
own chamber, where she could weep in quiet.

"I know it now, I know it now!" she whispered softly that night to
the tree that rose by her window. "Heigh-ho, what am I to do? I cannot
live; no, and now I cannot die. Ah me! what am I to do? I wish I were
a peasant-girl--but then perhaps he would not--Ah yes, but he would!"
And her low, long laugh rippled in triumph through the night, and
blended with the rustling of the leaves under a summer breeze, and
she stretched her white arms to heaven, imploring the kind God with
prayers that she dared not speak even to His pitiful ear.

"Love knows no princesses, my princess." It was that she heard as she
fled from him next day. She should have rebuked him. But for that she
must have stayed, and to stay she had not dared. Yet she must rebuke
him. She must see him again in order to rebuke him. Yet all this while
she must be pestered with the court of the Grand Duke of Mittenheim!
And when she would not name a day on which the embassy should come,
the king flew into a passion, and declared that he would himself set
a date for it. Was his sister mad, he asked, that she would do nothing
but walk every day by the river's bank?

"Surely I must be mad," thought Osra, "for no sane being could be at
once so joyful and so piteously unhappy."

Did he know what it was he asked? He seemed to know nothing of it. He
did not speak any more now of princesses, only of his princess; nor of
queens, save of his heart's queen; and when his eyes asked love, they
asked as though none would refuse and there could be no cause for
refusal. He would have wooed his neighbor's daughter thus, and thus
he wooed the sister of King Rudolf. "Will you love me?" was his
question--not, "Though you love, yet dare you own you love?" He seemed
to shut the whole world from her, leaving nothing but her and him;
and in a world that held none but her and him she could love unblamed,
untroubled, and with no trembling.

"You forget who I am," she faltered once.

"You are the beauty of the world,