She saw that his eyes were swimming with moisture: "I am indiscreet," she said, "but I couldn't help it; I felt I must find out how you were, highness.... Perhaps I wished to surprise you as well: I don't quite know. Something impelled me: I could not help coming to you. You are my guest and my crown-prince; I longed to see for myself how you were.... Your highness bore up well at dinner, but I felt...." Her voice flowed on, soft and monotonous, as though with drops of balsam. He asked her to sit down; she did so; he sat down by her side; the dark cloak slipped off and she was magnificent, with her white neck, siren-like in her opalescent, pale-green watered silk. He noticed that she had laid aside the jewels which she had worn at dinner. "I wanted to come to you quietly, through that door," she resumed, "in order to tell you once more, to tell you alone, how unspeakably thankful I am that your highness' life has been preserved...." Her voice trembled; her ebony glances grew moist; the light of the great candles in the silver candelabra shimmered over the silk of her dress, played with soft light and slumbering shadow in the modelling of her face, in the curve of her bosom. He pressed her hand; she retained his: "Was your highness crying when I came in?" she asked. His tears were still flowing, a last sob heaved through his body. "Why?" she asked again. "Or am I indiscreet?..." He looked at her; at this moment he could have told her everything. And, though he contained himself, yet he gave her the essence of his grief: "I was sad," he said, "because they seem to hate me. Nothing makes me so sad as their hatred." She looked at him long, felt his sorrow, understood him with her feminine tact, with her courtier-like swiftness of comprehension, which had ripened in the immediate contact of her sovereigns. She understood him: he was the crown-prince, he must suffer his special princely suffering; he must drink an imperial cup of bitterness to the dregs. She remembered that she herself had suffered, so often and so violently, for love, passionate woman that she was; she understood that his suffering was different from hers, but doubtless more terrible, as it seized him already at so young an age and as it depended not upon his own single soul, but upon the millions of souls of his empire. She too had suffered because she had not been loved; he also suffered like that. And so in one instant she understood him quite entirely, with all her strange woman's heart. A thrill of compassion welled up in her breast as a yet unknown delight and, like a fervent, gentle oracle, she uttered the words: "They do not all hate you...." He recognized her passionate glances of the day before. He remembered her kiss. He looked at her long, still hesitating a little in the presence of the unknown. Then he extended his arms and, with a dull cry of despair, hoarse with hunger for consolation, he called to her in his helplessness: "Oh, Alexa!..."