I was awakened by the note of a horn blown by some ranger in the forest. The sun was shining in through the window, night had vanished with all its dreams and fears, and Joubert was at the door.

Joubert, unsuccessful, perhaps, in one of his multifarious love-affairs, was grumpy; and when I tried to explain about the nocturnal visitors he wouldn't listen. He knew my imaginative powers, and put my story down to them; and, as for me, attracted by the events of the moment as all children are, I had nearly forgotten the whole matter by breakfast-time.

I was led down by Joubert and given into the charge of Gretel. Breakfast was laid for Eloise and me in the same boudoir where we had supped the night before, but lo, and behold! when we reached the room another child was there as well as Eloise.

A boy of my own age. A charming little figure dressed in the uniform of a Pomeranian grenadier.

"This is Carl!" cried Eloise, pulling the little grenadier forward by the hand. "This is Toto, Carl. I forgot his other name. No matter. I am hungry. Gretel, I pray you let us have breakfast."

Carl was dark; and he met me without smiling, and took my hand without grasping it properly, and looked at me, not directly, but in a veiled manner curious in a child so young.

Carl repelled me, and yet attracted me. When I contrast his face with the portrait in the picture-gallery of the schloss, I can see now, with the eye of memory, the awful likeness between him and the dead and gone Margaret von Lichtenberg, just as I can see the likeness between myself and Philippe de Saluce.

The "family likeness"—that mysterious fact in life before which science is dumb—never was more manifest; but what made the thing more curious, more deeply involved in mystery, was the fact that under the same roof, hundreds of years after the old tragedy of long ago, the facsimiles of the two actors should meet as children fresh to the world.

As for me this morning, I saw nothing in Carl von Lichtenberg but a little boy of my own age, somewhat fantastically dressed. The half-terror, the extraordinary sensation that the picture of Margaret von Lichtenberg had called up in my mind the night before, had expended itself and vanished, leaving me incapable of further psychic perception. Everything was commonplace again as the bread-and-butter that Gretel was cutting for us at the side-table.

The schloss was so vast, so solidly constructed, that no sound came to us from the other guests.

After breakfast, when we were running down a corridor making for the garden, and led by Eloise, a gentleman stopped us, and spoke a few words of greeting, and passed on.

"That was the King," said Eloise. "He is leaving to-morrow—he and Graf von Bismarck. We, too, are leaving the day after."

"You, too?" I cried, my childish heart recalling the lovely Countess Feliciani, who had been clean forgotten for twelve hours or more.

"Yes," said Eloise. "And there's mamma. Come along. See, she is with those ladies by the fountain."

We had broken into the garden, a wonderful and beautiful garden, with shaven lawns and clipped yew-trees, terraces, dim vistas cypress-roofed, and, far away down one of these alleys a sight to fascinate the heart of any child, the figure of a great stone man running. He was dressed in green lichen, lent him by the years; he held a spear in his hand, and he seemed in the act of hurling it at the game he was pursuing there beyond the cypress-trees at the edge of the singing pines.

For the garden became the forest without wall or barrier, except the shadow cast by the trees; and you could walk from the sunlight and the sound of the fountains into the dryad-haunted twilight and the old quaint world of the woods.

The Countess kissed Eloise; then she bent to kiss me, and I—I turned my face away—a crimson face—and felt like a fool.

Someone laughed—a gentleman who was standing by. The Countess laughed; and then, to my extreme relief, someone came to my rescue.

It was little Carl. He had run into the house for his drum, and now he was coming along the path solemnly beating it, with Eloise for a faithful camp follower. I joined her; and away down the garden we went, hand in hand, marching in time to the rattle of the little drum.

Eloise snatched flowers from the flower-beds as we passed them, and pelted the drummer with them as he marched before us; and so we went, a gallant company, through the garden, past the running man, and under the forest trees, the echoes and the bluejays answering to the drum.

My father, the Countess Feliciani, our host, and a number of ladies and gentlemen were in the garden. They laughed as we marched away; and when the shadow of the trees took us they forgot us, I suppose, and the pretty picture we must have made.

* * * * *

Scarcely twenty minutes could have elapsed when screams from the wood drew their startled attention, and out from the trees came Carl, dripping with water, without his drum, running, and screaming as he ran.

After him ran Eloise and I.

"He tried to drown me in the lake in the wood!" screamed Carl, clasping the knees of his father, who had run to meet him, and looking back at me. "He tried to drown me; he did it before—he did it before! Save me from him, father, father! Father! Father!"

Baron Lichtenberg's face, as he clasped the child, was turned on me. He was white as little Carl, and I shall never forget his expression.

"Did you try to drown my child?" he said. And he spoke as though he were speaking to a man.

Before I could reply Eloise struck in:

"Oh, Carl, how can you say such things? I saw it all. No, monsieur. They had a little quarrel as to who should play with the drum, and Toto pushed him, and he fell into the water. Was it not so, Carl?"

But Carl was incapable of answering. Screaming like a girl in hysterics he clung to the Baron, who had taken him in his arms.

"Now, then," said my father, who had come up. "What is this? What is the meaning of this, sir? Come, speak! Did you dare to——"

"Father," I said, "I pushed him, but I did not mean to hurt him—truly I did not."

"Do not blame him," said Von Lichtenberg, turning to the house with Carl in his arms. "It is Fate. Children do these things without knowing it. Do not punish him."

The hypocrisy of those last four words! Lost to my father, whose simple mind could not read the tones of a man's voice or guess what hatred can be hidden in honey.

"All the same," said my father, as the Baron departed, "the child is half drowned. You have disgraced yourself. Off with you to Joubert, and place yourself under arrest."

I saluted.

"Bread and water," said my father; "and for three days."

I saluted again, and marched off to the house dejectedly enough.

As I went, little footsteps sounded behind me, and Eloise ran up. "You must not mind Carl, Toto," said she. "He cannot help crying. Listen, and I will tell you a secret. I heard mamma telling it to father; they thought I was asleep. Little Carl is a girl! Monsieur le Baron has brought her up as a boy to avoid something evil that has been prophesied—so mother said. What is 'prophesied,' Toto?"

"I don't know," I replied, my head too full of the dismal prospect of arrest and bread and water to trouble much about anything else. Then religiously I went to Joubert who formally placed me under arrest.