knocking at the
door."

"It is as well you did not knock at the door," returned the Count, "for
my servants are long since in bed, and your knock would very likely have
reached neither their ears nor mine." And he drew up a chair and sat
down opposite to Wogan, bending forward with his hands upon his knees.
The firelight played upon his pale, indoor face, and it seemed to Wogan
that he regarded his guest with a certain wistfulness. Wogan spoke his
thought aloud,--

"Yet I might be any hedgerow rascal with a taste for your plate, and no
particular scruples as to a life or two lying in the way of its
gratification."

The Count smiled.

"Your visit is not so unexampled as you are inclined to think. Nearly
thirty years ago a young man as you are came in just such a plight as
you and stood outside this window at two o'clock of a dark morning. Even
so early in my life I was at my books," and he smiled rather sadly. "I
let him in and he talked to me for an hour of matters strange and
dreamlike, and enviable to me. I have never forgotten that hour, nor to
tell the truth have I ever ceased to envy the man who talked to me
during it, though many years since he suffered a dreadful doom and
vanished from among his fellows. I shall be glad, therefore, to hear
your story if you have a mind to tell it me. The young man who came
upon that other night was Count Philip Christopher von Koenigsmarck."

Wogan started at the mention of this name. It seemed strange that that
fitful and brilliant man, whose brief, passionate, guilty life and
mysterious end had made so much noise in the world, had crossed that
lawn and stood before that window at just such an hour, and maybe had
sat shivering in Wogan's very chair.

"I have no such story as Count Philip von Koenigsmarck no doubt had to
tell," said Wogan.

"Chevalier," said Count Otto, with a nod of approval, "Koenigsmarck had
the like reticence, though he was not always so discreet, I fear. The
Princess Sophia Dorothea was at that time on a visit to the Duke of
Wuertemberg at the palace in Stuttgart, but Koenigsmarck told me only that
he had snatched a breathing space from the wars in the Low Countries and
was bound thither again. Rumour told me afterwards of his fatal
attachment. He sat where you sit, Chevalier, wounded as you are, a
fugitive from pursuit. Even the stains and disorder of his plight could
not disguise the singular beauty of the man or make one insensible to
the charm