‘Apparently he passes half or all the night in the open air everywhere,’ said the margravine.

I glanced hurriedly over both faces.  The margravine was snuffing her nostrils up contemptuously.  The princess had vividly reddened.  Her face was luminous over the nest of white fur folding her neck.

‘Yes, I must have the taste for it:  for when I was a child,’ said I, plunging at anything to catch a careless topic, ’I was out in my father’s arms through a winter night, and I still look back on it as one of the most delightful I have ever known.  I wish I could describe the effect it had on me.  A track of blood in the snow could not be brighter.’

The margravine repeated,

’A track of blood in the snow!  My good young man, you have excited forms of speech.’

I shuddered.  Ottilia divined that her burning blush had involved me.  Divination is fiery in the season of blushes, and I, too, fell on the track of her fair spirit, setting out from the transparent betrayal by Schwartz of my night-watch in the pine-wood near the Traun river-falls.  My feelings were as if a wave had rolled me helpless to land, at the margravine’s mercy should she put another question.  She startled us with a loud outburst of laughter.

’No! no man upon this earth but Roy could have sat that horse I don’t know how many minutes by the clock, as a figure of bronze,’ she exclaimed.

Ottilia and I exchanged a grave look.  The gentleness of the old time was sweet to us both:  but we had the wish that my father’s extravagant prominency in it might be forgotten.

At the dinner-table I made the acquaintance of the Herr Professor Dr. Julius von Karsteg, tutor to the princess, a grey, broad-headed man, whose chin remained imbedded in his neck-cloth when his eyelids were raised on a speaker.  The first impression of him was, that he was chiefly neck-cloth, coat-collar, grand head, and gruffness.  He had not joined the ceremonial step from the reception to the dining saloon, but had shuffled in from a side-door.  No one paid him any deference save the princess.  The margravine had the habit of thrumming the table thrice as soon as she heard his voice:  nor was I displeased by such an exhibition of impatience, considering that he spoke merely for the purpose of snubbing me.  His powers were placed in evidence by her not daring to utter a sarcasm, which was possibly the main cause of her burning fretfulness.

I believe there was not a word uttered by me throughout the dinner that escaped him.  Nevertheless, he did his business of catching and worrying my poor unwary sentences too neatly for me, an admirer of real force and aptitude, to feel vindictive.  I behaved to him like a gentleman, as we phrase it, and obtained once an encouraging nod from the margravine.  She leaned to me to say, that they were accustomed to think themselves lucky if no learned talk came on between the Professor and his pupil.  The truth was, that