‘And by whom? By this Gondremark, to whom you counsel me to leave my country,’ cried the Prince. ‘Rare advice! The course that I have been following all these years, to come at last to this. O, ill-advised! if that were all! See now, there is no sense in beating about the bush between two men: you know what scandal says of her?’ Gotthold, with pursed lips, silently nodded. ‘Well, come, you are not very cheering as to my conduct as the Prince; have I even done my duty as a husband?’ Otto asked. ‘Nay, nay,’ said Gotthold, earnestly and eagerly, ‘this is another chapter. I am an old celibate, an old monk. I cannot advise you in your marriage.’ ‘Nor do I require advice,’ said Otto, rising. ‘All of this must cease.’ And he began to walk to and fro with his hands behind his back. ‘Well, Otto, may God guide you!’ said Gotthold, after a considerable silence. ‘I cannot.’ ‘From what does all this spring?’ said the Prince, stopping in his walk. ‘What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matter names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage,’ he added more hoarsely. ‘I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!’ ‘Ay, we have the same blood,’ moralised Gotthold. ‘You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic.’ ‘Sceptic?—coward!’ cried Otto. ‘Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!’ And as the Prince rapped out the words in tones of unusual vigour, a little, stout, old gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold, received them fairly in the face. With his parrot’s beak for a nose, his pursed mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain air of frozen dignity and wisdom. But at the smallest contrariety, his trembling hands and disconnected gestures betrayed the weakness at the root. And now, when he was thus surprisingly received in that library of Mittwalden Palace, which was the customary haunt of silence, his hands went up into the air as if he had been shot, and he cried aloud with the scream of an old woman. ‘O!’ he gasped, recovering, ‘Your Highness! I beg ten thousand pardons. But your Highness at such an hour in the library!—a circumstance so unusual as your Highness’s presence was a thing I could not be expected to foresee.’ ‘There is no harm done, Herr Cancellarius,’ said Otto.