snapped out the Baron, his protruding eyes
taking on a scandalised expression; "fancy the woman talking like that at
our table. She almost told us we were nobodies, and I don't believe a
word of it. She is just Schmidt and nothing more. She has been talking
to some of the peasants about the old Cernogratz family, and raked up
their history and their stories."

"She wants to make herself out of some consequence," said the Baroness;
"she knows she will soon be past work and she wants to appeal to our
sympathies. Her grandfather, indeed!"

The Baroness had the usual number of grandfathers, but she never, never
boasted about them.

"I dare say her grandfather was a pantry boy or something of the sort in
the castle," sniggered the Baron; "that part of the story may be true."

The merchant from Hamburg said nothing; he had seen tears in the old
woman's eyes when she spoke of guarding her memories--or, being of an
imaginative disposition, he thought he had.

"I shall give her notice to go as soon as the New Year festivities are
over," said the Baroness; "till then I shall be too busy to manage
without her."

But she had to manage without her all the same, for in the cold biting
weather after Christmas, the old governess fell ill and kept to her room.

"It is most provoking," said the Baroness, as her guests sat round the
fire on one of the last evenings of the dying year; "all the time that
she has been with us I cannot remember that she was ever seriously ill,
too ill to go about and do her work, I mean. And now, when I have the
house full, and she could be useful in so many ways, she goes and breaks
down. One is sorry for her, of course, she looks so withered and
shrunken, but it is intensely annoying all the same."

"Most annoying," agreed the banker's wife, sympathetically; "it is the
intense cold, I expect, it breaks the old people up. It has been
unusually cold this year."

"The frost is the sharpest that has been known in December for many
years," said the Baron.

"And, of course, she is quite old," said the Baroness; "I wish I had
given her notice some weeks ago, then she would have left before this
happened to her. Why, Wappi, what is the matter with you?"

The small, woolly lapdog had leapt suddenly down from its cushion and
crept shivering under the sofa. At the same moment an outburst of angry
barking came from the dogs in the castle-yard, and other dogs could be
heard yapping and barking in t