He went to a sideboard, and filling a glass carried it to Wogan.  The liquor was brandy.  Wogan drank it as though it had been so much water.  He was in that condition of fatigue when the most extraordinary events seem altogether commonplace and natural.  But as he felt the spirit warming his blood, he became aware of the great difference between his battered appearance and that of the old gentleman with the rich dress and the white linen who stooped so hospitably above him, and he began to wonder at the readiness of the hospitality.  Wogan might have been a thief, a murderer, for all Count Otto knew.  Yet the Count, with no other protection than his dog, had opened his window, and at that late hour of the night had welcomed him without a word of a question.

“Sir,” said Wogan, “my visit is the most unceremonious thing in the world.  I plump in upon you in the dark of the morning, as I take it to be, and disturb you at your books without so much as knocking at the door.”

“It is as well you did not knock at the door,” returned the Count, “for my servants are long since in bed, and your knock would very likely have reached neither their ears nor mine.”  And he drew up a chair and sat down opposite to Wogan, bending forward with his hands upon his knees.  The firelight played upon his pale, indoor face, and it seemed to Wogan that he regarded his guest with a certain wistfulness.  Wogan spoke his thought aloud,—­

“Yet I might be any hedgerow rascal with a taste for your plate, and no particular scruples as to a life or two lying in the way of its gratification.”

The Count smiled.

“Your visit is not so unexampled as you are inclined to think.  Nearly thirty years ago a young man as you are came in just such a plight as you and stood outside this window at two o’clock of a dark morning.  Even so early in my life I was at my books,” and he smiled rather sadly.  “I let him in and he talked to me for an hour of matters strange and dreamlike, and enviable to me.  I have never forgotten that hour, nor to tell the truth have I ever ceased to envy the man who talked to me during it, though many years since he suffered a dreadful doom and vanished from among his fellows.  I shall be glad, therefore, to hear your story if you have a mind to tell it me.  The young man who came upon that other night was Count Philip Christopher von Koenigsmarck.”

Wogan started at the mention of this name.  It seemed strange that that fitful and brilliant man, whose brief, passionate, guilty life and mysterious end had made so much noise in the world, had crossed that lawn and stood before that window at just such an hour, and maybe had sat shivering in Wogan’s very chair.

“I have no such story as Count Philip von Koenigsmarck no doubt had to tell,” said Wogan.