'There are no carriages here but our lady's, and she will not let you stir this afternoon, my lord,' he answered in German, as he aided the stranger to put on his own linen and shooting breeches, now dry and smoothed out by careful hands.
'But I have no coat! said the traveller in discomfiture, remembering that his coat was gone with his rifle and his powder-flask.
'The Herr Professor thought you could perhaps manage with one of these. They were all of Count Gela's, who was a tall man and about your make,' said an older man-servant who had entered, and now showed him several unworn or scarcely worn suits.
'If you could wear one of these, my lord, for this evening, we will send as soon as it is possible for your servant and your clothes to S. Johann; but it is impossible to-day, because a bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.'
'You are all of you too good,' said Sabran, as he essayed a coat of black velvet.
Pull of his new acquaintance and all his talents, the good man Greswold had hurried away to obey the summons of his ladies, who had desired to see him. He found them in the white room, a grand salon hung with white satin silver-fringed, and stately with white marble friezes and columns, whence it took its name. It was a favourite room with the mistress of the Schloss; at either end of it immense windows, emblazoned and deeply embayed, looked out over the sublime landscape without, of which at this moment every outline was shrouded in the grey veil of an incessantly falling rain.
With humble obeisances Greswold presented the message and the credentials of her guest to Wanda von Szalras; it was the first occasion that he had had of doing so. She read the document signed by the Kaiser with a smile.
'This is the paper which this unhappy gentleman spoke of when I arrested him as a poacher,' she said to her aunt. 'The Marquis de Sabran. The name is familiar to me: I have heard it before.'
'Surely you do not forget the Pontêves-Bargême, the Ducs de Sabran?' said the Princess, with some severity. S. Eleazar was a Comte de Sabran!'
'I know! But it is of something nearer to us than S. Eleazar that I am thinking; there was surely some work or another which bore that name, and was much read and quoted.'