'I wish that one could know who he was,' she said regretfully. To harbour an unknown person was not agreeable to her in these days of democracies and dynamite.
'What does it matter?' said her niece. 'Though he were a Nihilist or a convict from the mines, he would have to be sheltered to-night.'
'The Herr Professor is very inattentive,' said the Princess, with an accent that from one of her sweetness was almost severe.
'The Herr Professor is compiling the Flora of the Hohe Tauern,' said her niece, 'and he will publish it in Leipzig some time in the next twenty years. How can a botanist care for so unlovely a creature as a man? If it were a flower indeed!'
'I never approved of that herbarium,' said the Princess, still severely. 'It is too insignificant an occupation beside those great questions of human ills which his services are retained to study. He is inattentive, and he grows even impertinent: he almost told me yesterday that my neuralgia was all imagination!'
'He took you for a flower, mother mine, because you are so lovely; and so he thought you could have no mortal pain!' said Wanda, tenderly.
Then after a pause she added:
'Dear aunt, come with me. I have asked Father Ferdinand to have a mass to-night for Bela. I fancy Bela is glad that no other life has been taken by the lake.'
The Princess rose quickly and kissed her.
In the Strangers' Gallery, in a great chamber of panelled oak and Flemish tapestries, the poacher, as he lay almost asleep on a grand old bed, with yellow taffeta hangings, and the crown of the Szalras Counts in gilded bronze above its head, he heard as if in his dream the sound of chanting voices and the deep slow melodies of an organ.