'No, no,' said the swimmer; but as he spoke his eyes closed, he staggered a little; a deadly faintness and cold had seized him, and cramp came on all his limbs.
The men caught him, and carried him up the stairs; he strove to struggle and protest, but Otto the forester stooped over him.
'Keep you still,' he muttered. 'You have the Countess's orders. Trespass has cost you dear, my master.'
'I do not think he is greatly hurt,' said the mistress of Szaravola to her house physician. 'But go you to him, doctor, and see that he is warmly housed and has hot drinks. Put him in the Strangers' Gallery, and pray take care my aunt is not alarmed.'
The Princess Ottilie at that moment was alternately eating a nougat out of her sweetmeat box and telling the beads of her rosary. The sound of the wind and the noise of the storm could not reach her in her favourite blue-room, all capitonnée with turquoise silks as it was; the only chamber in all Szaravola that was entirely modern and French.
'I do hope Wanda is running no risk,' she thought, from time to time. 'It would be quite like her to row down the lake.'
But she sat still in her lamp light, and told her beads.
A few moments later her niece entered. Her waterproof mantle had kept her white gown from the rain and spray.
There was a little moisture on her hair, that was all. She did not look as if she had stirred further from her drawing-room than the Princess had done.
Now that the stranger was safe and sound he had ceased to have any interest for her; he was nothing more than any flotsam of the lake; only one other to sleep beneath the roofs of Hohenszalras, where half a hundred slept already.