"If you were to see me, you would see that I am not unhappy. It is May, the sun is shining, the oriel-windows are open. In the distance, when I look out, I can see the Zanthos winding away in a broad, gleaming expanse of water. Close by my writing-table stands your beautiful big silver cradle; and through the closed lace curtains I can see my little Duke of Xara slumbering.... I don't know how to write all this to you, I have no command of words in which to express it fully to you; but what I feel, with this wide river landscape before me and this precious little child by my side: oh, mamma, it is not unhappiness! It is a feeling which hides a great deal of melancholy, but which hides nothing more sombre than that. And really why should it, in spite of that melancholy, not be even happiness? I am young, I am empress and I see life before me! Round about me, I see my country, I see my people: I want it to become the people of my heart, of my soul, entirely. I don't yet know how, but I want to live for this people, I want to live together with Othomar. Oh, I grant you, how I am to do that I don't yet know, but I shall find a way, together with him! And, having a husband and a child and a people, an emperor, a crown-prince and an empire, have I then no aim in life? And, having an aim in life--and such a tremendous aim!--have I not then also happiness? Is happiness anything other than to have found a lofty, a noble aim in life? "I am so anxious to convince you. And, if you saw me here, at our quiet St. Ladislas, now that all the agitation of the coronation-festivities is past, you would believe me. Othomar loves St. Ladislas and proposes to come here every year for a month in the spring. It is considered a good omen that my child was born here, for you know the feeling of the Liparians, their wish to see the crown-prince of their country born at St. Ladislas, under the immediate protection of the patron saint. "Othomar, however, is not here at the moment: he has gone for a few days to Lipara--of course, you know this from the papers--and writes to me twice a day. I asked him to do this so that I might be fully informed as to his state of mind. The tragedy of his father's death, the Emperor Oscar's two days' death-agony affected Othomar so violently, so violently: my God, how can I find words to describe that terror to you! How can I still live in hope, after all that I have already suffered in my short life and seen around me in the way of terror! And yet, yet it is like that, for youth is so strong and I, I am strong, I _must_ be strong....