ears
was with her.

His appearance gave me a strange shock. He was Eugen, older and without
any of his artist brightness; Eugen's grace turned into pride and stony
hauteur. He looked as if he could be savage upon occasion; a nature born
to power and nurtured in it. Ruggedly upright, but narrow. I learned him
by heart afterward, and found that every act of his was the direct,
unsoftened outcome of his nature.

This was Graf Bruno; this was the proud, intensely feeling man who had
never forgiven the stain which he supposed his brother had brought upon
their house; this was he who had proposed such hard, bald, pitiless
terms concerning the parting of father and son--who forbade the child to
speak of the loved one.

"Ha!" said he, "you have found Sigmund, _mein Fraeulein_? Where did you
meet, then?"

His keen eyes swept me from head to foot. In that, at least, Eugen
resembled him; my lover's glance was as hawk-like as this, and as
impenetrable.

"In the music-room," said Sigmund; and the uncle's glance left me and
fell upon the boy.

I soon read that story. The child was at once the light of his eyes and
the bitterness of his life. As for Countess Hildegarde, she gazed at her
nephew with all a mother's soul in her pathetic eyes, and was silent.

"Come here," said the Graf, seating himself and drawing the boy to him.
"What hast thou been doing?"

There was no fear in the child's demeanor--he was too thoroughly a child
of their own race to know fear--but there was no love, no lighting up of
the features, no glad meeting of the eyes.

"I was with Nahrath till Aunt Hildegarde sent for him, and then I went
to practice."

"Practice what? Thy riding or fencing?"

"No; my violin."

"Bah! What an extraordinary thing it is that this lad has no taste for
anything but fiddling," observed the uncle, half aside.

Graefin Hildegarde looked sharply and apprehensively up.

Sigmund shrunk a little away from his uncle, not timidly, but with some
distaste. Words were upon his lips; his eyes flashed, his lips parted;
then he checked himself, and was silent.

"_Nun denn!_" said the count. "What hast thou? Out with it!"

"Nothing that it would please you to hear, uncle; therefore I will not
say it," was the composed retort.

The grim-looking man laughed a grim little laugh, as if satisfied with
the audacity of the boy, and his grizzled mustache swept the soft cheek.

"I ride no further this morning; but this afternoon I sh