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24 the world with only one hand. The other is stunted, useless, a deformity, he will have to hide it. What a drawback! What an impediment! He will have to brave it out before the world all his life. We must let it gradually leak out, so that it may not cause too much of a shock on his first appearance in public. No, I cannot yet get over it. A prince with one hand &hellip;"

"'With one hand,'" said Herr von Knobelsdorff. "Did your Royal Highness use that expression twice deliberately?"

"Deliberately?"

"You did not, then? &hellip; For the Prince has two hands, yet as one is stunted, one might if one liked also describe him as a prince with one hand."

"What then?"

"And one must almost wish, not that your Royal Highness's second son, but that the heir to the throne were the victim of this small malformation."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Why, your Royal Highness will laugh at me; but I am thinking of the gipsy woman."

"The gipsy woman? Please go on, my dear Baron!"

"Of the gipsy woman—forgive me!—who a hundred years ago prophesied the birth of a prince to your Royal Highness's house—a prince 'with one hand'—that is how tradition puts it—and attached to the birth of that prince a certain promise, couched in peculiar terms."

The Grand Duke turned on his seat and stared, without saying a word, at Herr von Knobelsdorff, at the outer corners of whose eyes the radiating wrinkles were playing. Then, "Mighty entertaining!" he said, and resumed his former attitude.

"Prophecies," continued Herr von Knobelsdorff, "generally come true to this extent, that circumstances arise which one can interpret, if one has a mind to, in their sense. And the broadness of the terms in which every