The sight of a grey-jacketed, green-collared sportsman, dog at heel, crossing the flat land to the hills of the forest, pricked him enviously, and caused him to ask what change had come upon him, that he should be hurrying to a town for a change of clothes.  Just as Potts was about to jump out, a carriage, with a second behind it, left the inn door.  He rubbed a hand on his unshaven chin, tried a glance at his shirt-front, and remarking:  ‘It won’t be any one who knows me,’ stood to let the carriages pass.  In the first were a young lady and a gentleman:  the lady brilliantly fair, an effect of auburn hair and complexion, despite the signs of a storm that had swept them and had not cleared from her eyelids.  Apparently her maid, a damsel sitting straight up, occupied the carriage following; and this fresh-faced young person twice quickly and bluntly bent her head as she was driven by.  Potts was unacquainted with the maid.  But he knew the lady well, or well enough for her inattention to be the bigger puzzle.  She gazed at the Black Forest hills in the steadiest manner, with eyes betraying more than they saw; which solved part of the puzzle, of course.  Her reasons for declining to see him were exposed by the presence of the gentleman beside her.  At the same time, in so highly bred a girl, a defenceless exposure was unaccountable.  Half a nod and the shade of a smile would have been the proper course; and her going along on the road to the valley seemed to say it might easily have been taken; except that there had evidently been a bit of a scene.

Potts ranked Henrietta’s beauty far above her cousin Livia’s.  He was therefore personally offended by her disregard of him, and her bit of a scene with the fellow carrying her off did him injury on behalf of his friend Fleetwood.  He dismissed Woodseer curtly.  Thirsting more to gossip than to drink, he took a moody draught of beer at the inn, and by the aid of a conveyance, hastily built of rotten planks to serve his needs, and drawn by a horse of the old wars,’ as he reported on his arrival at Baden,—­reached that home of the maltreated innocents twenty minutes before the countess and her party were to start for lunch up the Lichtenthal.  Naturally, he was abused for letting his bird fly:  but as he was shaven, refreshed, and in clean linen, he could pull his shirt-cuffs and take seat at his breakfast-table with equanimity while Abrane denounced him.

‘I’ll bet you the fellow’s luck has gone,’ said Potts.  ’He ’s no new hand and you don’t think him so either, Fleet.  I’ve looked into the fellow’s eye and seen a leery old badger at the bottom of it.  Talks vile stuff.  However, ’perhaps I didn’t drive out on that sweltering Carlsruhe road for nothing.’

He screwed a look at the earl, who sent Abrane to carry a message and heard the story Potts had to tell.