Thus my foolish brain was heated more and more. The charm of adventure, the inward delight in this uncontrolled life, which I called liberty, a monstrous confusion of the conceptions of right and duty, gratitude, hot blood of youth, passionate first-love--all held me spell-bound in this charmed circle, which was a world to me. All drew me with irresistible force to the man who seemed to me the perfect ideal of a knight and a hero, to the lovely maiden who so far exceeded my wildest dreams. And the fact that these two, to whom I clung with equal love, stood opposed to each other, only tended to confirm the dream of my own indispensability. In their several ways, each had been equally kind to me, had shown me equal confidence. The fulfilment of my most ardent wish, that of seeing them reconciled, had never appeared so near as this morning, when I paced my room and looked out of the windows at the blue sky, in which great white motionless clouds were standing, and upon the park whose majestic groups of trees and broad expanses of grass were magically lighted by the splendor of the sun. How could I have believed that these white clouds would so soon spread into a sable pall and obscure that sun--that I had seen my paradise in its magic radiance for the last time? CHAPTER XII. The confidence with which Herr von Zehren had looked forward to that evening, which at the very least was to repair his former ill-fortune, was after all a deceitful one. It may be that an incident which occurred just previously, deprived him of that coolness which this evening he more than ever needed. For on our way up from the beach, where we had shot a brace of rabbits among the dunes, as crossing the heath we drew near to Trantowitz, a cavalcade of ladies and gentlemen, attended by a couple of liveried servants, came galloping by. My attention was entirely attracted by a slender young man riding a superb English horse, who, at the moment he passed me, was leaning over to one of the ladies with a charming smile on his pale face, on which a downy moustache just darkened the upper lip. The lady gave her horse a sudden cut with the whip, and they shot on in advance. I gazed for a moment after the company, and was turning to Herr von Zehren with the question: "Who are they?" when I checked myself in surprise at the change in his countenance. We had just been chatting pleasantly together, and there now lay in his looks an expression of the blackest wrath, and he had unslung his gun and half raised it to his shoulder, as if he would send a shot after the retreating party. Then he flung it hastily over his shoulder again, and walked a short distance silent at my side, until he suddenly broke out into the most furious execrations, which I had never before heard from him, though he could be angry enough upon occasion. "The hound!" he exclaimed, "he dares to come here upon the soil that belongs to my friend Trantow! And I stand quietly