Erna hastened after, her heart beating, and all her body burning with the sudden rush of blood that for one breathless instant had seemed to gather itself into her heart, leaving her cold and lifeless. She had never seen her husband as in this act he had revealed himself to her, and she was divided between wonder and a fearful admiration. He had seemed a creature more than human as he bent the mighty neck of the great stag, and there was in her proud sense of his prowess not a little feeling of dread and too of strangeness, as if this hunter were not only the husband she knew, but some strange being whose true nature she had never before suspected. As her palfrey carried her across the narrow valley, she remembered the taunt she had flung at him as they left the castle, and it flashed through her mind that anger at herself might have mingled with the excitement of the chase to move him. The hunt was all about the dead stag by the time Erna reached the spot. Albrecht came forward to help her dismount. His eyes were shining, his cheek was flushed, and under the open collar of his hunting-jacket, pushed back from his throat, his chest rose and fell. He had never looked handsomer, and as he swung his wife down from her palfrey, she brushed his hand with a quick kiss. The restless fancies which had been weaving themselves about her and drawing her nearer as in a net toward Count Stephen seemed to be snapped and swept aside in an instant, and her heart was as truly her husband's as on the day when she had wed. XVIII HOW HERR VON ZIMMERN CAME AGAIN. For a night and for a day Erna's love of her husband burned again with its most ardent flame; but Albrecht, so far from rejoicing as she did in the mighty feat he had done at the stag-hunt, seemed to be repentant that his old-time mood should have got the better of him, and when Erna told the tale of his prowess to her great-aunt the baron hastened to change the conversation, and that with the air of regretting and being ashamed of having given way to the impulse of the moment.