[Footnote 7:  A Castle, now a well-preserved ruin, in the Giant Mountains in N. Germany.  The legend is that its mistress, Kunigerude, vowed to marry nobody except the Knight who should ride round the parapet of the Castle, and many perished in the attempt.  At last one of them succeeded in performing the feat, but he merely sternly rebuked her, and took his leave.  He was accompanied by his wife, disguised as his page, according to some versions of the legend.—­TRANSLATOR.]

He came in to supper where he found himself for the first time in company with all the members of the family, just in the frame of mind that was suitable for ghosts, and was not a little surprised when his host told him, half smiling and half seriously, that the “White Lady” was disturbing the castle again, and that she had latterly been seen very often.  “Yes, indeed,” Countess Ida exclaimed; “You must take care, Baron, for she haunts the very wing where your room is.”  The hussar was just in the frame of mind to take the matter seriously, but, on the other hand, when he saw the dark, ardent eyes of the Countess, and then the merry blue eyes of her daughter fixed on him, any real fear of ghosts was quite out of the question with him.  For Baron T. feared nothing in this world, but he possessed a very lively imagination, which could conjure up threatening forms from another world so plainly that sometimes he felt very uncomfortable at his own fancies.  But on the present occasion that malicious apparition had no power over him; the ladies took care of that, for both of them were beautiful and amiable.

The Countess was a mature Venus of thirty-six, of middle height, and with the voluptuous figure of a true Viennese, with bright eyes, thick dark hair, and beautiful white teeth, while her daughter Ida, who was seventeen, had light hair and the pert little nose of the china figures of shepherdesses in the dress of the period of Louis XIV., and was short, slim, and full of French grace.  Besides them and the Count, a son of twelve and his tutor were present at supper.  It struck the hussar as strange that the tutor, who was a strongly-built young man, with a winning face and those refined manners which the greatest plebeian quickly acquires when brought into close and constant contact with the aristocracy, was treated with great consideration by all the family except the Countess, who treated him very haughtily.  She assumed a particularly imperious manner towards her son’s tutor, and she either found fault with, or made fun of, everything that he did, while he put up with it all with smiling humility.

Before supper was over their conversation again turned on to the ghost, and Baron T. asked whether they did not possess a picture of the White Lady.  “Of course we have one,” they all replied at once; whereupon Baron T. begged to be allowed to see it.  “I will show it you to-morrow,” the Count said.  “No, Papa, now, immediately,” the younger lady said mockingly; “just before the ghostly hour, such a thing creates a much greater impression.”