anding, nor deigned to
notice me at all, but passed out of the room as rapidly as she entered;
still, I remembered that I had already seen her before, and passed a
delightful evening in her company at a little inn in the Black Forest."

When the narrator had got thus far in his story, I leaned forward to
catch a full view of him, and saw, to my surprise, and, I own, to my
misery, that he was the German count we had met at the Titi-See. So
overwhelming was this discovery to me, that I heard nothing for many
minutes after. All of that wretched scene between us on the last evening
at the inn came full to my memory, and I bethought me of lying the whole
night on the hard table, fevered with rage and terror alternately. If
it were not that his narrative regarded Miss Herbert now, I would have
skulked out of the room, and out of the inn, and out of the town itself,
never again to come under the insolent stare of those wicked gray eyes;
but in that name there was a fascination,--not to say that a sense of
jealousy burned at my heart like a furnace.

The turmoil of my thought lost me a great deal of his story, and might
have lost me more, had not the hearty laughter of his comrades recalled
me once again to attention.

He was describing how, as a _vetturino_, he drove their carriage with
his own spanking gray horses to Coire, and thence to Andeer. He had
bargained, it seemed, that Miss Herbert should travel outside in the
cabriolet, but she failed to keep her pledge, so that they only met
at stray moments during the journey. It was in one of these she said
laughingly to him,--

"'Nothing would surprise me less than to learn, some fine morning, that
you were a prince in disguise, or a great count of the empire, at least.
It was only the other day we were honored with the incognito presence of
a royal personage; I do not exactly know who, but Mrs. Keats could tell
you. He left us abruptly at Schaffbausen.'

"'You can't mean the creature,' said I, 'that I saw in your company at
the Titi-See?'

"'The same,' said she, rather angrily.

"'Why, he is a saltimbanque; I saw him the morning I came through
Constance, with some others of his troop dragged before the maire
for causing a disturbance in a cabaret; one of the most consummate
impostors, they told me, in Europe.'"

"An infamous falsehood, and a base liar the man who says it!" cried I,
springing to my legs, and standing revealed before the company in an
attitude of haugh