many curious characteristics gained of his experience. Jorian DeWitt had
indeed compared them to the female ivy that would ultimately kill its
tree, but inasmuch as they were parasites, they loved their debtor; he
was life and support to them, and there was this remarkable fact about
them: by slipping out of their clutches at critical moments when they
would infallibly be pulling you down, you were enabled to return to them
fresh, and they became inspired with another lease of lively faith in
your future: et caetera. I knew the language. It was a flash of
himself, and a bad one, but I was not the person whom he meant to deceive
with it. He was soon giving me other than verbal proof out of England
that he was not thoroughly beaten. We had no home in England. At an
hotel in Vienna, upon the close of the aristocratic season there, he
renewed an acquaintance with a Russian lady, Countess Kornikoff, and he
and I parted. She disliked the Margravine of Rippau, who was in Vienna,
and did not recognize us. I heard that it was the Margravine who had
despatched Prince Hermann to England as soon as she discovered Ottilia's
flight thither. She commissioned him to go straightway to Roy in London,
and my father's having infatuatedly left his own address for Prince
Ernest's in the island, brought Hermann down: he only met Eckart in the
morning train. I mention it to show the strange working of events.

Janet sent me a letter by the hands of Temple in August. It was
moderately well written for so blunt a writer, and might have touched me
but for other news coming simultaneously that shook the earth under my
feet.

She begged my forgiveness for her hardness, adding characteristically
that she could never have acted in any other manner. The delusion, that
what she was she must always be, because it was her nature, had mastered
her understanding, or rather it was one of the doors of her understanding