"Papa!--Papa!" the child shouted. She looked round,--there stood the old Count watching her in mute delight. "Has he conquered you too at last?" he exclaimed, "there's no finer little fellow in all Austria than our Ossi!" And he held out his hands to the child. She let him be taken from her, and without a word walked away toward the castle. Ah, what a wretched night she passed after this episode! No, she would not think of him, it hurt too much. Time passed; for weeks she would not look at him; then suddenly she would appear when he was taking his lessons, and for a couple of days she would watch him with a morbid intensity which sometimes degenerated into lurking distrust; then finding nothing to justify the distrust she would again turn from him. In spite of his excellent disposition the boy might perhaps have grown up a good-natured but inconsiderate egotist, had not Count Lodrin taken an unwearied interest in his training, guiding him aright with the most affectionate gentleness. The influence of the frail old man upon the child was invaluable. In the society of an invalid so tender and so loving, the boy learned what he could have learned nowhere else,--to bow before weakness, and helplessness, the only two potentates whose sway natures as proud as Oswald's acknowledge. He learned to refine his innate haughtiness by the most considerate delicacy towards his inferiors, and to consider his pride as inseparable from devotion to duty and an impregnable sense of honour. Sometimes the Countess would steal to the door of the library, where the father and son were wont to talk together, and would listen. She did so once when the old man was seriously reproving the boy for some rudeness that he had shown towards his tutor. "I know it, papa, I am wrong, but Herr Mueller is a coarse kind of man, and I cannot abide coarseness," she heard the boy say, and the old man rejoined gently, "He is unfortunate, Ossi, remember that before all. How, think you, could he endure his lot if in his veins ran such blood as yours?" All things swam before the mother's eyes, as with downcast looks she hurried away, locked herself in her room and wrung her hands. * * * She never addressed a kind word to him, treating him with studied indifference, with almost malignant severity. Under such treatment the boy suffered, grew pale, thin, and nervous. Then came a damp, warm autumn, the skies were every day veiled behind leaden clouds,--it drizzled continually without actually raining, and the leaves instead of falling rotted on the trees. A terrible epidemic broke out in the country around Tornow, and raged like a pestilence, carrying off victim after victim, until at last it appeared in the market town itself.