Such a time of feverish excitement had come for the company at Castle Grenwitz also. Just now they had been so quiet--But Bruno's accident might have told the acute observer that beneath the smooth even surface, with its polite courtesy and its painful compliance with social forms, there was something seething and heaving; secret love and deep-hidden hate; hostility masked by the appearance of perfect peace and good-will--heartfelt sympathies under the cover of indifference and even antipathy. The very face of life had changed. The stillness, so perfect as almost to become oppressive, which had formerly reigned in the château, was now frequently interrupted. Baron Felix, who had little disposition to play the hermit, could not deny himself the pleasure of taking up one or the other of his favorite pursuits. The day after his arrival his two superb saddle-horses had already come, and thus larger excursions were made possible, when the carriage could be escorted by at least two of the gentlemen on horseback. In a remote part of the garden a rough shooting-gallery was knocked up, and during the late afternoon hours the short, sharp crack of rifled pistols could be heard in the quiet rooms that looked upon the garden. As riding, shooting, and hunting are amusements which demand numbers, Oswald, Albert, and even Bruno were never safe, lest Felix should come and beg them and plague them till they yielded to his wishes, and became his companions in one or the other of his pastimes. Felix was one of those men who are never idle, without ever being well occupied; he would spend hours at his toilet, and read between Béranger's songs or a few chapters in the _Liaisons Dangereuses_, his two favorite books; or he would play the first bars of a piece of music, stopping abruptly to complete the training of his handsome pointer, and thus continually waste very valuable natural gifts in the pursuit of frivolous and bootless purposes. For Felix had been richly endowed by nature, and even his idle and reckless life had not been able to destroy them all. No one could mistake the desire for something better that was in him, although it would show itself unfortunately only in a feverish restlessness with which he took up everything that was new, in an ambition to be everywhere the first, or at least to appear to be first, nay, even in his unmeasured vanity, and the incredible attention which he bestowed upon his appearance. He might have been saved, perhaps, if he had ever discovered the higher purposes of life, or at least had been forced to eat the bread of poverty. As it was, he slowly and pleasantly drifted down the current of his passions towards the point where he must infallibly sink and drown if a miracle did not intervene to save him.