observance of the universally acknowledged harmony existing between his
pretensions, his tastes and habits, and his person. He contrived by I
know not what persuasiveness and simplicity of manner and speech to
banish from me the idea that he was engaged in playing a high stake; and
though I knew it, and he more than once admitted it, there was an ease
and mastery about him that afforded me some degree of positive comfort
still. I was still most securely attached to his fortunes. Supposing
the ghost of dead Hector to have hung over his body when the inflamed son
of Peleus whirled him at his chariot wheels round Troy, he would, with
his natural passions sobered by Erebus, have had some of my reflections
upon force and fate, and my partial sense of exhilaration in the
tremendous speed of the course during the whole of the period my father
termed his Grand Parade. I showed just such acquiescence or resistance
as were superinduced by the variations of the ground. Otherwise I was
spell-bound; and beyond interdicting any further public mention of my
name or the princess's, I did nothing to thwart him. It would have been
no light matter.

We struck a station at a point half-way down to Bulsted, and found little
Kiomi there, thunder in her brows, carrying a bundle, and purchasing a
railway-ticket, not to travel in our direction. She gave me the singular
answer that she could not tell me where her people were; nor would she
tell me whither she was going, alone, and by rail. I chanced to speak of
Heriot. One of her sheet-lightning flashes shot out. 'He won't be at
Bulsted,' she said, as if that had a significance. I let her know we
were invited to Bulsted. 'Oh, she 's at home'; Kiomi blinked, and her
features twitched like whip-cord. I saw that she was possessed by one of
her furies. That girl's face had the art of making me forget beautiful
women, and what beauty was by comparison.