away with lowered head shut himself up again in his apartments.

"His father and mother feared for his reason. His outward tranquillity
was appalling to them. They had nothing to trust to but that very youth
which made his despair so self-absorbed and so intense. Old Prince John,
fretful and anxious, repeated: 'Poor Roman should be roused somehow.
He's so young.' But they could find nothing to rouse him with. And the
old princess, wiping her eyes, wished in her heart he were young enough
to come and cry at her knee.

"In time Prince Roman, making an effort, would join now and again the
family circle. But it was as if his heart and his mind had been buried
in the family vault with the wife he had lost. He took to wandering in
the woods with a gun, watched over secretly by one of the keepers, who
would report in the evening that 'His Serenity has never fired a shot
all day.' Sometimes walking to the stables in the morning he would order
in subdued tones a horse to be saddled, wait switching his boot till it
was led up to him, then mount without a word and ride out of the gates
at a walking pace. He would be gone all day. People saw him on the
roads looking neither to the right nor to the left, white-faced, sitting
rigidly in the saddle like a horseman of stone on a living mount.

"The peasants working in the fields, the great unhedged fields, looked
after him from the distance; and sometimes some sympathetic old woman on
the threshold of a low, thatched hut was moved to make the sign of the
cross in the air behind his back; as though he were one of themselves, a
simple village soul struck by a sore affliction.

"He rode looking straight ahead seeing no one as if the earth were empty
and all mankind buried in that grave which had opened so suddenly in