Charlie and Ernestine betook themselves to the piano, where eye could look into eye, and finger touch finger occasionally in the duet, or soft whispers be exchanged amid a sonata of Beethoven; the Countess retired to doze in the boudoir, with her Spitz pug on her knee; while Herminia and her betrothed found sufficient attraction in each other; so the evening of this eventful day passed off peacefully and happily, as many others had done. During the protracted progress of the sonata, the two antiquarians from the Dom Kirche agreed that their engagement--for such they fully considered it now--should, as yet, not be divulged to anyone, not even to Herminia, from whom Ernestine had never before had a secret to withhold. Outwardly, our hero and heroine seemed merely intimate friends who were soon to part; inwardly, they had their own happy thoughts, while the family had not the slightest suspicion of how matters stood, though that night all was on the very verge of discovery! In the recess of a window, whither they had gone to study the stars, Charlie suddenly pressed Ernestine to his breast. 'Oh, dearest, don't do that again!' she exclaimed. 'Aunt Adelaide may see us; and she has the eyes of a lynx!' After this night, matters progressed fast with the lovers. In the same house, they had a hundred means of meeting each other, were it but for five minutes at a time. Rings and locks of hair, of course, with coloured photos--the best that could be got in Aix-la-Chapelle--had been exchanged; promises were made and vows exchanged again and again, with other delicious tokens equally intangible. In the flush of his love, Charlie forgot for a time the cruel doubts that had at first oppressed him. Ernestine should be his wife at all risks, even if he carried her off to England; and, in the ardour of his imagination, he began to marvel whether his father's old place in Warwickshire would ever be free from those debts which drove him to become a wanderer, a soldier of fortune, and to feed himself by his sword in the ranks of the Prussian army. CHAPTER VI. AN ALARM. Amid the pure satisfaction arising from the knowledge that Ernestine loved him, and the natural anxiety to discover how she was ever to be his wife, there was fated to come to Charlie Pierrepont the fear of greater opposition to his--as yet--secret hopes and wishes, in the person of a formidable rival, who, in a few weeks after the visit to the Dom Kirche, came suddenly into the field. One evening, when the Count, his son, and Charlie were seated cosily in a place which the former called his study (but which more resembled a harness and gun room, and littered with pipes of all kinds, as the literature there consisted of a few volumes on hunting, shooting, farriery), with their pipes and flasks of Rhine wine, which they drank from silver tankards, the Count startled our hero by a revelation which he made to him as a friend of the family.