"Shall I leave you alone for a little, Valérie?" he asked, gently. She shook her head, smiling sadly. Her bosom seemed to heave with uncontrollable emotion. "Why, Othomar?" she asked. "I am lonely enough at nights, with my thoughts. Leave me alone with them as little as you can...." She suddenly held out her hand to him: "Will you forgive your future empress her broken heart?" she asked, suddenly, with a great sob. And her pale, shrunken face turned full towards him, with two eyes like those of a stricken doe. An irrepressible feeling of pity caused something to well up unexpectedly in his soul; he squeezed her hand and turned away, so as not to weep. He looked out of the window. Some of the pointed towers, visible from here, rose with an air of sombre romance against the sky, which was luminous with electricity. Below them, romantically, murmured the Danube. The mountains were like the landscape in a ballad. But no ballad, no romance echoed between their two hearts. The prose of the inevitable necessity was the only harmony that united them. But this harmony also united them in reality, brought them together, made them understand each other, feel and live at one with each other. They were now for a minute alone and their eyes frankly sought the depths of each other's souls. There was no need for pretence between these two: each saw the other's sorrow lying shivering and naked in the other's heart. It was not the riotous passion of despair that they beheld. They saw a gentle, tremulous sadness; they looked at it with wide, staring eyes of anguish, as children look who think they see a ghost. For them that ghost issued from life itself: life itself became for them a ghostly existence. They themselves were spectres, though they know that they were tangible, with bodies. What were they? Dream-beings, with crowns; they lived and bowed and acted and smiled as in a dream, because of their crowns. They did not exist: a vagueness did indeed suggest in their dream-brains that something might exist, in other laws of nature than those of their sphere, but in their sphere they did not exist.... His hand was toying mechanically with some papers that lay near him, on the mirror-bracket between two of the window-recesses; they were illustrated periodicals, doubtless left there by some chamberlain. He took one up, to while their sad silence, and opened it. The first thing that he saw was their own portraits: "Look," he said.