Wondering at the unusual reticence of his old chum, but attributing it to shyness, the Count, seeing that he now had an opportunity for a chat, and, anxious to hear what his friend had been doing in the long interval since they had last met, sat down beside him on the couch, and thus began: "How very odd that you should have turned up to-night! If you hadn't come just when you did, I don't know what would have happened!"
"But I do!" was the quiet reply. "You would have been the first to rise from the table, and, consequently, you would have died within the year. That is why I came."
At this the Count burst out laughing. "Come, come, Max!" he cried. "You always were a bit of a wag, and I see you haven't improved. But be
serious now, I beg you, and tell me what made you come to-night and what you have been doing all these years? Why, it must be sixteen years, if a day, since last I saw you!"
Max leaned back in his seat, and, regarding the Count earnestly with his dark, penetrating eyes, said, "I have already told you why I came here to-night, and you don't believe me, but WAIT! Now, as to what has happened to me since we parted. Can I expect you to believe that? Hardly! Anyhow, I will put you to the test. When we parted, if you remember rightly, I had just passed my final, and having been elected junior house surgeon at my hospital, St Christopher's, at Brunn, had taken up my abode there. I remained at St Christopher's for two years, just long enough to earn distinction in the operating theatre, when I received a more lucrative appointment in Cracow. There I soon had a private practice of my own and was on the high road to fame and fortune, 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."