Oswald tried to master his emotion; he felt as if the baron's sharp eyes were able to read what was going on in his soul. But the latter remained apparently quite unconcerned, and entirely preoccupied by the subject of their conversation: Czika and the Brown Countess. Both men tried in vain to solve the enigma of this remarkable affair with all their ingenuity. What could have induced the Brown Countess to leave her child, which she seemed to love most devotedly, so unceremoniously in the hands of strangers? How could she gather courage to part with her at the very moment when the brutal jokes of the young noblemen--young Count Grieben's groom had told the whole story to Oldenburg's coachman--and the playful elopement with the child had excited her rage to such a degree? Had she given the girl to Oswald or to the baron, or had she not given her but merely sold her, postponing the day of payment for a month, in the hope that the two men, or either of them, would in the mean time become so attached to the child that she would receive a higher price for her? "My special apprehension," said Oldenburg, "is that the Brown Countess may repent of her bargain and take the child again from me, or that the Czika cannot resist the longing after her young life, and vanishes some fine morning or other. I confess it would be a severe blow for me. Your prophecy that I would find in the sweet child a treasure more precious than Aladdin's magic lamp, seems to have been fulfilled. I should like to be the child's father! I should like to endow this silent heart with speech, to see my own thoughts beautified and ennobled in the new language. I should like to bind her to me with all the ties that can bind a daughter to her father, a father to his daughter--of course only in order to see these ties torn, and some jackanapes come and ask me to throw her into his arms, because his coat fits him a little better than his neighbor's! I am now in that period of life when one longs to have children; when one is not a Swiss, who, you know, proposed to eat children, though not from love; I long for them as a tired wanderer desires a staff to support his weary limbs. When we feel that we have reached the turning-point in our life, and that we must go down hill henceforth, while the land of our youth is gradually disappearing behind the top of the hill, then we would like to hear joyous children's voices reach us from the other side, which recall to us our own happy childhood. You will ask me why I do not yield to my prosaic desires and marry?--Or perhaps you will not ask me so; for you will see yourself that marriage is out of question for a man who has spent the ten best years of his life in all kinds of _liaisons dangereuses_ and _innocentes_, I do not want a wife who does not wish me to say to her: I love you! and how can I tell her so without making myself ridiculous in my own eyes, after having said so to I know not how many in all the