uch men?" asked Wogan.

"Men who love, such as Count Koenigsmarck and yourself."

Wogan held up his hand with a cry.

"Count, such men, we are told, are the blindest of all. Did not
Koenigsmarck prove it? As for myself, not even in that respect can I be
ranked with Koenigsmarck. I am a mere man-at-arms, whose love-making is a
clash of steel."

"But to-night--this risk you ran; you told me it was for a woman."

"For a woman, yes. For love of a woman, no, no, no!" he exclaimed with
surprising violence. Then he rose from his chair.

"But I have stayed my time," said he, "you have never had a more
grateful guest. I beg you to believe it."

Count Otto barely heard the words. He was absorbed in the fanciful
dreams born of many long solitary evenings, and like most timid and
uncommunicative men he made his confidence in a momentary enthusiasm to
a stranger.

"Koenigsmarck spoke for an hour, mentioning no names, so that I who from
my youth have lived apart could not make a guess. He spoke with a deal
of passion; it seemed that one hour his life was paradise and the next a
hell. Even as he spoke he was one instant all faith and the next all
despair. One moment he was filled with his unworthiness and wonder that
so noble a creature as a woman should bend her heart and lips from her
heaven down to his earth. The next he could not conceive any man should
be such a witless ass as to stake his happiness on the steadiness of so
manifest a weathercock as a woman's favour. It was all very strange
talk; it opened to me, just as when a fog lifts and rolls down again, a
momentary vision of a world of colours in which I had no share; and to
tell the truth it left me with a suspicion which has recurred again and
again, that all my solitary years over my books, all the delights which
the delicate turning of a phrase, or the chase and capture of an elusive
idea, can bring to one may not be worth, after all, one single minute of
living passion. Passion, Chevalier! There is a word of which I know the
meaning only by hearsay. But I wonder at times, whatever harm it works,
whether there can be any great thing without it. But you are anxious to
go forward upon your way."

He again took up his lamp, and requesting Wogan to follow him, unlatched
the window. Wogan, however, did not move.

"I am wondering," said he, "whether I might be yet deeper in your debt.
I left behind me a sword."

Count Otto set his lamp down and took a sword from t