"Have you seen her since?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Where and when?"
"Eight or nine years ago, in--what do they call the hole?--Naples."
"That was the time that you disappeared from here, and no one knew what had become of you."
"Yes," said Hans.
"In Naples?"
"Yes."
It quite taxed the imagination to fancy Hans von Trantow in Naples, the northern bear among the southern jackals, and a most urgent impulse must it have been which drove him for the first and only time in his life from the Penates of his ruined home, and his native heaths and moors, out into the wide world.
It was in December nine years before--I had then been a month in detention under examination--that Hans had received a letter which caused him to lay game-bag and gun aside--he was just going out shooting--harness up his sledge and drive off to Fährdorf, where he crossed the ice to Uselin, and from Uselin travelled day and night, until after many hinderances--he at first thought he must look for Naples in Turkey, and only found the right direction after extreme difficulties and some lost time--at the end of about a month he happily reached the city he was in search of. Here, after some trouble--for the good Hans spoke and understood no language but his own honest German--he discovered the hotel mentioned in the letter, and found her whom he was looking for. But not as he expected to find her; not as the letter had represented her. She had spoken of herself as "betrayed," "forsaken," one who looked to him as her only refuge, her preserver from the direst misery and a certain death. Hans had naturally taken all this literally, and was somewhat astounded to find her in one of the grandest hotels on the Toledo, in luxuriously furnished apartments, and splendidly dressed, looking more lovely than ever, though not a little confused--indeed, even turning pale--at sight of him. She had probably not supposed that her appeal would receive so instantaneous a response, and that she would have no notice beforehand, and in consequence she was taken unprepared. So it had to be that a German princess, who was really in Naples at the time, had interested herself in her, and insisted that the daughter of so ancient and distinguished a family should accept her assistance. But the favor of the great is inconstant, and often clogged with conditions hard to be complied with by a proud spirit. The princess had demanded, as the price of her favor, that Constance should marry off-hand a certain young Baron, who, it was said, had stood a little too high in the exalted favor of the princess herself; and she, Constance, was one of those who may err, and err grievously, but will never act against the voice of their heart.