In the life of the late Count von Rittenberg it had fallen to the lot of Father Christopher to see not a few strange things. He had accompanied that warrior in several of his campaigns, and he had seen the fierce Huns and the gigantic Saxons, with their barbaric ornaments of beaten gold, their dress of skins, and their strange weapons. He had more than once pondered in his mind whether these hordes of the dark North had human souls, at least before the Church had set upon them the seal of baptism and thus forever marked them as separated from the beasts of the field or the forest which to the eye of the priest they so much resembled. All that he had hitherto seen, however, faded into insignificance in his mind when compared with that which was now daily before his eyes. He seemed to himself sometimes involved in some strange dream from which he might at any moment awake with only a more or less confused remembrance of what it had been. His old vague questionings concerning the souls of the Huns recurred to his mind; but the perplexing thing was that they who really had souls should have so completely seemed to lack them, while Baron Albrecht, with his magnificent beauty, his manly bearing, his knightly skill and courtesy, should have in truth been without an immortal spirit. The secret of which the priest had been made the repository so absorbed his attention that he could scarcely give either thought or interest to anything else, and not infrequently did Erna laughingly assure him that his one occupation in life seemed to have become watching her husband.