"Don't say that about yourself, Your Highness!" Karl immediately spoke up to stop her. Seeing her belittle herself like this, the last traces of awkwardness and strange emotion in his heart were replaced by an understanding born of shared suffering, and by a sense of responsibility.
"This wasn't your fault. Everything just now was me... It was me being overwhelmed by desire, losing my reason, forcing myself on you. You were resisting the entire time, and in the end, you were the one who stopped me. You kept your vow. You should be proud of that, not blame yourself. If anyone has to be called... disgraceful, then it should be me."
His comfort was sincere. After confessing his feelings for Charlotte, when he looked at Louise again, there was less of the estrangement and faint hostility that had come from a political marriage, and more understanding and sympathy between two people fallen to the same end of the world, along with a peculiar, subtle understanding built on their respective senses of betrayal.
They were like two prisoners who had stumbled upon each other in the dark, each bearing heavy shackles. In awkwardness and pain, they had glimpsed the soft forbidden ground in the depths of the other's heart, a place no one was allowed to touch.
This subject was too heavy, and too private. Delving any deeper would only make them both even more embarrassed and pained.
After a brief silence, both of them tacitly stopped entangling themselves in the penitential contest of "who had wronged whom more."
Karl's gaze, unconsciously, fell on the princess again.
The fierce struggle just now, the confession, and the emotional turmoil had left the front of the nightgown he had pulled open still in disarray. It was only that all their attention had been