rtune,
when I was unlucky enough to fall in love."

"Unlucky!" laughed the Count. "Pray what was the matter with her? Had
she no dowry, or was she an heiress with an ogre of a father, or was she
already married?"

"Married," Max responded, "married to a regular martinet who, whilst
treating her in the same austere manner he treated his soldiers--he was
colonel of a line regiment--was jealous to the verge of insanity. It was
when I was attending him for a slight ailment of the throat that I met
her, and we fell in love with each other at first sight."

"How romantic!" sighed the Count. "How very romantic! Another glass of
Moselle?"

"For some time," Max continued, not noticing the interruption, "all went
smoothly. We met clandestinely and spent many an hour together, unknown
to the invalid. We tried to keep him in bed as long as we could, but his
constitution, which was that of an ox, was against us, and his recovery
was astonishingly rapid. An indiscreet observation on the part of one of
the household first led him to suspect, and, watching his wife like a
cat does a mouse, he caught her one evening in the act of holding out
her hand for me to kiss. With a yell of fury he rushed upon us, and in
the scuffle that followed----"

"You killed him," said the Count. "Well! I forgive you! We all forgive
you! By the love of Heaven! you had some excuse."

"You are mistaken!" Max went on, still in the same cold, unmoved
accents, "it was I who was killed!" He looked at the Count, and the
Count's blood turned to ice as he suddenly realised he was, indeed,
gazing at a corpse.

For some seconds the Count and the corpse sat facing one another in
absolute silence, and then the latter, rising solemnly from the chair,
mounted the window-sill, and, with an expressive wave of farewell,
disappeared in the absorbing darkness without. Now, as Max was never
seen again, and it was ascertained without any difficulty that he had
actually perished in the manner he had described, there is surely every
reason to believe that a _bona fide_ danger had threatened the Count,
and that the spirit of Max in his earthly guise had, in very deed,
turned up at the dinner party with the sole object of saving his friend.

_Spilling Salt_

Everyone knows that to avoid bad luck from spilling salt, it is only
necessary to throw some of it over the left shoulder; but no one knows
why such an act is a deterrent to misfortune, any more than why
misfortune