sition as she sat and watched it, lay besides like a load upon her
conscience. She met Otto almost with a sense of guilt, and yet she
welcomed him as a deliverer from ugly things.

But the wheels of an interview are at the mercy of a thousand ruts; and
even at Otto's entrance, the first jolt occurred. Gondremark, he saw,
was gone; but there was the chair drawn close for consultation; and it
pained him not only that this man had been received, but that he should
depart with such an air of secrecy. Struggling with this twinge, it was
somewhat sharply that he dismissed the attendant who had brought him in.

'You make yourself at home, _chez moi_,' she said, a little ruffled both
by his tone of command and by the glance he had thrown upon the chair.

'Madam,' replied Otto, 'I am here so seldom that I have almost the rights
of a stranger.'

'You choose your own associates, Frederic,' she said.

'I am here to speak of it,' he returned. 'It is now four years since we
were married; and these four years, Seraphina, have not perhaps been
happy either for you or for me. I am well aware I was unsuitable to be
your husband. I was not young, I had no ambition, I was a trifler; and
you despised me, I dare not say unjustly. But to do justice on both
sides, you must bear in mind how I have acted. When I found it amused
you to play the part of Princess on this little stage, did I not
immediately resign to you my box of toys, this Grunewald? And when I
found I was distasteful as a husband, could any husband have been less
intrusive? You will tell me that I have no feelings, no preference, and
thus no credit; that I go before the wind; that all this was in my
character. And indeed, one thing is true, that it is easy, too easy, to
leave things undone. But Seraphina, I begin to learn it is not always
wise. If I were too old and too uncongenial for your husband, I should
still have remembered that I was the Prince of that country to which you
came, a visitor and a child. In that relation also there were duties,
and these duties I have not performed.'

To claim the advantage of superior age is to give sure offence. 'Duty!'
laughed Seraphina, 'and on your lips, Frederic! You make me laugh. What
fancy is this? Go, flirt with the maids and be a prince in Dresden
china, as you look. Enjoy yourself, _mon enfant_, and leave duty and the
state to us.'

The plural grated on the Prince. 'I have enjoyed myself too much,' he
sa