Watching his opportunity, while the Emperor slept, he opened the coffin, and took the golden wedding-ring from the finger of Fastrada, and cast it into the lake below the castle, and thus broke Charles' spell of sorrow. From that day the great lake into which the magic ring was cast, and which quite surrounded the Schloss, began to shrink, and nothing of it remained but the tiny horse-pond already mentioned. And while she was telling this legend, a little grey owl sat in the window of the ruin, winking and blinking in the sunshine, as if he was weary of having heard the story so often. The ruin, too, was haunted by the spectre of a former Count of Frankenburg, who, resolving to get rid of his Countess, to the end that he might marry again, invited her to share a dish of love-apples with him. These he divided with a silver-knife poisoned on one side; but by some mistake, he ate all the poisoned halves himself, and so fell dead at the table; and there in the upper story of the tower, his cries of pain and despair were sometimes heard on the wind in the stormy nights of winter. So, amid this sweet intercourse--like one gathering beautiful flowers on the brink of a giddy precipice--did Charlie Pierrepont drift into a deep and hopeless passion. He never spoke of it, but surely his eyes must have told, and his manner too, that he loved her. Oh yes, how he loved her, this earnest and warm-hearted young Englishman, yet was silent. He dared not seek to lead her into a promise to wait till the sun of Fortune shone on him, to waste her young and happy life till slow promotion came: and even were he a colonel, the Count might--nay, would--look for wealth or rank, or both; and while he--Charlie--was thus waiting, could he ask a girl so lovely to trust to the doctrine of chances, for a lucky spoke in the wheel of the blind goddess, and to grow _fade_ and withered with the sickness of hope deferred? Yet the sweet face, the dark shining hair, the tender, bright eyes, the pretty winning ways--oh, those pretty winning ways, that twine so round the heart of a man!--haunted him in the waking hours of the night, and in his tormenting, yet delicious, dreams by day. CHAPTER V. WHAT HAPPENED IN THE DOM KIRCHE. Strong though the sentiment of friendship that existed between him and Heinrich, Charlie shrunk from making a confidant of him, as he knew but too well that his aristocratic prejudices and native ambition would preclude him from having any sympathy with such a secret love, or giving it the least encouragement. So the days of joy stole away at Frankenburg, till Charlie began to reckon sadly the few that yet remained, when time would inexorably separate him from Ernestine, and, too probably, for ever. Did she suspect that he loved her?