He
meant to follow Julie and Suzanne in any event to the hunting lodge, but
it was not sufficient merely to follow. He must appear in some capacity
that would permit him to be of service. And yet Providence was working
for him at that moment.
Prince Karl of Auersperg in his magnificent modernized apartments in the
huge castle was also troubled by an inability to sleep. Hitherto in his
fifty or more years of life he had always got what he wanted. His blood
was more ancient than that of either Hohenzollern or Hapsburg. The
Auerspergs had been princes of the Holy Roman Empire for a thousand
years and now he was a prince of both Teutonic empires and a general of
the first rank in the army of Germany. His wealth was so vast that he
scarcely knew the extent of his own lands and here in Zillenstein he
could maintain the power and state that appertained to a baron of the
Middle Ages.
A mind that has only to wish for a thing to get it becomes closed in
fifty years. It mistakes desire for right. It regards opposition as
sacrilege. Other minds that differ from it are wicked because they
differ. The thick armor of Prince Karl's self-complacency had been
pierced as it were by a tiny needle that stung, however tiny, as if its
point were laden with poison.
He, the omniscient and omnipotent, had been defied and by whom? A mere
slip of a girl! A child! She was not even of his own race! But perhaps
it was this very defiance that made him wish for her all the more.
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