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Updated: May 31, 2025
And Osra tore her veil from her face, and turned on him eyes of radiant triumph. "It is done," she cried; "it is done!" "Yes, it is done, my princess," said he. "And and it is begun, my prince," said she. "Yes, and it is begun," said he. She laughed aloud in absolute joy, and for a moment he also laughed. But then his face grew grave, and he said: "I pray you may never grieve for it."
It was in the spring of the year that Ludwig, Prince of Glottenberg, came courting the Princess Osra; for his father had sought the most beautiful lady of a royal house in Europe, and had found none to equal Osra. Here Ludwig stayed many days, coming every day to the king's palace to pay his respects to the king and queen, and to make his court to the princess.
She turned, he sprang up; she spoke coldly, yet kindly. "Sir," said she, "I cannot but notice that you lie every day here by the river, with your book, and that you sigh. Tell me your trouble, and if I can I will relieve it." "I am reading, madam," he answered, "of Helen of Troy, and I am sighing because she is dead." "It is an old grief by now," said Osra, smiling.
So that, if a stranger goes now to Strelsau, he may be pardoned if it seem to him that all mankind was in love with Princess Osra. Nay, and those stories so pass all fair bounds that, if you listened to them, you would come near to believing that the princess also had found some love for all the men who had given her their love.
Osra hesitated a little, and then went up and examined each part of the ostrich. It had only been an imitation ostrich after all; for the head and neck were mounted on a stick, the feathers were only sewn on to a skin stuffed with straw, and the curious, little white legs belonged to a man who was now quite dead.
"Why would you not mourn, sir, if you were a prince?" said she. "For princes and princesses have their share of sighs." And with a very plaintive sigh Osra looked at the rapid-running river, as she waited for the answer. "Because I would then go to Strelsau, and so forget her." "But you are at Strelsau now!" she cried with wonderful surprise. "Ah, but I am no prince, madam!" said he.
Was his sister mad, he asked, that she would do nothing but walk every day by the river's bank? "Surely I must be mad," thought Osra, "for no sane being could be at once so joyful and so piteously unhappy." Did he know what it was he asked? He seemed to know nothing of it.
"There are many forms of love," smiled the king. "This is such love as a prince and a princess may most properly feel." "I do not call it love at all," said Osra, with a pout. When Prince Ludwig came next day to see her, and told her, with grave courtesy, that his pleasure lay in doing her will, she broke out: "I had rather it lay in watching my face;" and then, ashamed, she turned away from him.
For it was reported that a sentinel that had stood guard that night was missing, and that the gate-warden of the western gate was nowhere to be found, and that a mysterious letter had come by an unknown hand to the king, and lastly, that Princess Osra their princess was gone; whether by her own will or by some bold plot of seizure and kidnapping, none knew.
The bishop shook his head. His profession was peace; yet his blood, also, was hot against the man who had put a slight on Princess Osra. "The king must know of it," he said. "The king? The king is not here tonight," said Osra; and she pricked her horse, and set him at a gallop. The moon, breaking suddenly in brightness from behind a cloud, showed the bishop her face.
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