CHAPTER XV. SCHÖN-ROHTRAUT. Do you know the ballad of ’Schön-Rohtraut’—the king’s daughter who would neither spin nor sew, but who fished, and hunted, and rode on horseback through the woods, with her father’s page for her only companion? Was there any wonder that the youth grew sad, and inwardly cried to himself— "O dass ich doch ein Königssohn wär, Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut lieb’ ich so sehr. Schweig stille, mein Herze!" One day they rested themselves under a great oak, and the merry Schön-Rohtraut laughed aloud at her woe-stricken page, and cried— "Why do you look at me so longingly? If you have the heart to do it, come and kiss me, then!" Whereupon the lad, with a terrible inward tremor, probably, went up and kissed Schön-Rohtraut’s laughing lips. And they two rode quite silently home; but the page joyously said to himself, "I do not care now whether she were to be made Empress to-day; for all the leaves in the forest know that I have kissed Schön-Rohtraut’s mouth." There are many of us whose chief consolation it is to know that we have kissed Schön-Rohtraut’s mouth. The middle-aged man, getting a trifle grey above the ears, sits by the fire of a winter evening, and thinks of his own particular Schön-Rohtraut. "I did not marry her; but I loved her in the long-bygone time, and that is enough for me. I had my ’liberal education.’ If I had married her, perhaps I should not be loving her now; and all my tender memories of her, and of that pleasant time, would have disappeared. But now no one can dispossess me of the triumphant consciousness that it was my good fortune to have kissed Schön-Rohtraut’s mouth." There is much sympathy abroad upon this matter; and I think we men never get nearer to each other than when we talk, after our wives have gone upstairs to bed, of our lost loves. This was partly what Will Anerley said to himself as the little party sate under the white awning of the _König Wilhelm_, and slowly steamed up the yellow-green waters of the Rhine. Not without a tremor of conscience he said it; for he had a vague impression that he had been wantonly cruel to Dove. In the first moments of remorse after awaking to a sense of his present position, he had said— "There remains but one thing to be done. I will at once return to England, and see Annie Brunel no more." But a man approaching thirty has taught himself to believe that he has great fortitude, especially where the tenderer emotions are concerned; and his next reflection was— "My sudden departure will only be a revelation to her, and happily she knows nothing about it. Besides, have I not sufficient strength of mind to spend a few days in the pleasant society of this young girl, without committing myself? The mischief is done, and I must suffer for my carelessness; but——"