"I am indeed."
"'Tis quite a story. But I say, Gos, how comfortable you are here!" and he began to stride to and fro in the bachelor apartment; "although you don't waste much time or money in decoration, old fellow: not a pretty woman on the walls. H'm! my room looked rather different in my bachelor days. What have you done with your gallery of beauties, Gos?"
"I bequeathed all my youthful follies to my cousin Brock, who got his lieutenancy six weeks ago," said Goswyn, to whom his brother's chatter was especially distasteful to-day.
"H'm! h'm! you're right: you're getting quite too old for such nonsense." And Otto stooped to examine two or three photographs that adorned his brother's writing-table. "That's a capital picture of old Countess Lenzdorff," he exclaimed,--"capital! Here is our father when he was young,--I look like him,--and here is Uncle Goswyn, our famous hero, killed in a duel at thirty years of age. They say old Countess Lenzdorff was in love with him. As if she could ever have been in love! And you look like him: our mother always said so. Oh, here is our mother!" He took the faded picture, in its old-fashioned frame, to the window to examine it. "This is the best picture there is of her," he said. "Think of your ever being that pretty little rogue in a white frock in her arms, and I that boy in breeches by her side! Comical, but very attractive, such a picture of a young mother with her children. How she clasps you in her arms! She always loved you best. Where did you get this picture?"
"My mother gave it to me when I was quite young. She brought it to me when she came to see me in my first garrison, shortly before her death," said Goswyn.
"I remember; you had been wounded in your first duel."
"Yes; she came to nurse me."
"Ah, you've a deal on your conscience. No one would believe you were worse than I; but"--with a look at the picture--"I'd give a great deal for such a little fellow as that." And he put the picture back in its place with a care that was unlike him, and that touched Goswyn.
With his usual want of tact, Otto proceeded to efface the pleasant impression he had produced. "Have you no picture of the Lenzdorff girl?" he asked, looking round the room.
"I may have one somewhere," Goswyn replied, evasively. Indeed, he had a charming picture of her in the first bloom of her maiden loveliness; but he kept it behind lock and key, that no profane eye might rest upon his treasure.