"The Worronska!"
"The fast countess!" cried Moritz. "What a model of an Amazon! How beautiful she is, managing those four horses and looking up here! That look is for you, Johannes. See! she is smiling at you."
"I shall not interfere with Herbert," laughed Johannes. "I hear he is devoted to her."
"What! Herbert!--to the Worronska?" cried Moritz. "How did that happen?"
"Why, he was tutor for some years to a friend of the count's in St. Petersburg. He knew her there," replied Johannes.
"Now, that would be a charming daughter-in-law for you, my dear Staatsräthin," said Helm. "Why, she would be even worse than the Hartwich."
"Bah!" said Johannes. "She too is only a woman. If she fell, she owed her ruin to a man,--and a man might have been her saviour."
[CHAPTER II.]
THE SWAN.
A dark, gloomy pile overlooked the village of Hochstetten, that lay about two miles from the city, in the midst of a charming country. It had once been called Hochstetten Castle; but since the direct line of the noble family in which it had passed for a century from father to son had died out, and only a castellan had dwelt there, to hold it in possession for a distant branch of its ancient house, it had gone by the name of the "Haunted Castle" among the people; for of course in such an old house, where so many men had died, there must be ghosts, and popular superstition declared that the spirits of the departed still hovered about the spot where their earthly forms had been wont to wander.