"Yes," said he, with an affectation of carelessness. "It is one of Dove’s favourite airs. But she won’t accept the modern words as representing the song; she will have it that the melody describes the parting of two friends——" "Come, then," said the Count, briskly, "dinner is ready. Miss Brunel, you shall play us the—the what, did you say?—to-morrow, after the man has come from Donaueschingen to tune the piano. Not a bad piano, either, as you’ll see; and now I don’t grudge having bought it along with the rest of the furniture, when I find that _you_ will charm us with an occasional song. Four hundred florins, I think it was; but I don’t know." As they retired into the long dining-saloon, where a sufficiently good dinner was placed on the table, Hermann came out into the courtyard, surrounded by a lot of yelping little beagles, with short stumpy legs, long ears, long noses, and sagacious eyes. Further, there was a huge brown mastiff, with long lithe limbs, and tremendous jaws, at sight of which Grete shrank back, for the brute was the terror of the village. "Go down, then, thou stupid dog, thou worthless follow! seest thou not the young lady is afraid? Ah, du guter Hund, du Rudolph, and so thou knowest me again? Come along, Grete, he won’t touch you; and we’ll go to see your father." "You won’t tell him I was waiting for you, Hermann?" said the girl, shyly. Hans Halm stood at the door of his _châlet_-looking hostelry, in a thin white coat and a broad straw hat, with a complacent, benevolent smile on his stout visage and shrewd blue eyes. Sometimes he looked up and down the road, wondering what had become of Grete, who, Frau Halm being dead, had taken her mother’s place in the management of the inn. Perhaps Hans suspected where his tender-hearted, black-eyed daughter had gone; at least, he was in nowise surprised to see her coming back with Hermann, Rudolph joyously barking by their side. The two men shook hands heartily, and kissed each other; for had they not, some years before, pledged themselves solemnly to call each other "du," and sworn eternal friendship, and drank a prodigious quantity of Affenthaler over that ceremony? "Gretchen, get you indoors; the house is quite full, and you can’t expect your grandmother to do everything." Hermann looked into the passage. On the pegs along the wall were hung a number of guns—nearly all of them double-barrelled breechloaders; with white barrels, and broad green straps for the slinging of them over the shoulder. "My men are within, _nicht wahr_?" he said. "Listen, and you will hear," said Hans Halm.