“Nephew or not, a young man of about your height, whose voice I did not notice particularly, but with a very agreeable face, dressed in a black suit throughout—a very good-looking young fellow—”
“Good-looking? I wish to heaven it could have been myself, M. Johan! But I was so very sleepy that I should hardly have known it even if he had been there. I only saw a drunken fellow whom they call Ulphilas.”
“And did M. Goefle see nothing of this stranger?”
“I don’t think he did.”
“Did he know nothing of him?”
“Ah! that reminds me—yes, I recollect. I heard M. Goefle complaining about some person who had made use of his name to attend the ball. Is that it?”
“Exactly.”
“But, M. Major-domo, if you were so puzzled about this unknown, why didn’t you have him followed?”
“We were not puzzled at the time. He had given himself out for a near relative of the advocate, and, as a matter of course, we expected to see him again. It was only this morning, when the lawyer had disavowed him, that the baron thought of inquiring who the unknown could be, who, under a feigned name, had ventured to introduce himself into the house. No doubt it was some impertinent fellow who had laid a wager about it; one of the students from the Falun Mining-school, perhaps—unless, indeed, he really should be a natural son of the advocate—as he himself, it seems, intimated—whom his father, however, does not permit to assume his name.”
“All that seems to me hardly worth the trouble of so much inquiry,” observed Christian, with an air of indifference. “Will you allow me now, M. Major-domo, to go and have some supper?”