"All the more desirable, it seems to me, that he should be a man in the full sense of the word. But is the Grenwitz estate really so magnificent?" "Why, my dear friend," exclaimed the minister, in a tone of gentle reproach that Oswald should display such deplorable ignorance in such all-important matters, "is it magnificent? There are in this neighborhood alone five, no--with Stantow and Baerwalde, which to be sure are not entailed, there are seven large estates belonging to it. And in other parts of the island--let me see--there are one, two, three more. That is a capital of at least a million and a half. A million and a half!" he repeated, as if his mind could not part easily with such a lofty conception. "And the estate is entailed?" "Why, certainly. With the exception, of course, of two of the finest estates, which the last baron, the cousin of the present baron, inherited from his mother, and which he tied up in a very peculiar manner. Just imagine, my dear friend: the late baron, who, between us be it said, was a prodigiously wild and dissipated man, left these two estates to the son of one of his mistresses?" "But did you not just now count the two estates as part of the family fortune?" "Well, between us we can do so, I think," said the minister, in a low voice, coming up closely to Oswald. "Nobody knows, you see, where the boy is, nay, whether he is at all alive, nay, they do not even know if it is a boy or a girl." "Why, that is a curious story," said Oswald, laughing. "A very curious story," said the reverend gentleman, "a ridiculous story, you might say. Just think: Baron Harald,--they have all of them odd names in the family--that wild fellow, who ought to have lived somewhere in the middle ages, fell in love with a poor girl, the daughter of a mechanic, a case which no doubt was of frequent occurrence in his life, but never had such disastrous consequences. He carried her off, almost by force, and brought her here to his château. Half a year later she escapes in the middle of the night. No one knows to this day whether she ran away to live in obscurity, or to hide her shame in one of our dark moors. The baron was furious, beside himself. He searched through the whole island. Then, in order to drown his grief and his remorse, he drank and gambled and led a life even worse than before, so that he died in delirium a few weeks later. When they open his testament, they find that he has left the income derived from those two superb estates to the mother, and the estates themselves to the child of his lady-love, whether it be a girl or a boy, provided only it be born within a given period. He had evidently had a fit of penitence before dying, or, it may be, it was a mere caprice. What do you say to that?" "The story certainly is rather tragic than comic," said Oswald; "and have they never found any trace of the mother or her child?"