'And then you kissed me, Carl, with such tender and passionate kisses as you gave me on that dear day in the Hoch Munster, and called me your little wife and your guardian angel. I was then startled by the great hall clock striking three in the morning, and awoke to weep on finding that it was all a dream, but a dear, dear dream to me.' These were the actions and words of Charlie's dream, and he remembered that when he awoke the hour of _three_ was tolled in the village spire! 'What can it mean?' he exclaimed, tossing his thick curly hair back from his forehead, impatiently--a way he had; 'the mystery of dreams is unfathomable; they are, indeed, "strange--passing strange!" The same dream, yet we are miles upon miles apart! The same words spoken and heard!--the same night!--the same hour and moment of time!' Was there some magnetic influence at work? Some spiritual affinity, born of this great love, between these two? It almost seemed so. Charlie Pierrepont, a matter-of-fact young officer, knew as little of the famous Dr. Emmerson's theories of polarity and odic force, as he did of the Philosophy of the Infinite, or any other abstruse speculation of the present day. Though bewildered and perplexed, as we have said, it gave him a thrill of strange delight to think how strong, and yet how tender, must be the tie of love between him and Ernestine to produce a spiritual intercourse like this; and lest they might be laughed at by the heedless Heinrich, it was not until some days subsequent to the arrival of her letter that he revealed its contents to her brother, to whom, fortunately for the corroboration of the story, he had told of his vivid dream on the morning it occurred, before the regiment marched from the village. CHAPTER XV. WHAT THE 'EXTRA BLATT' TOLD. A few days after the Thuringians and others advanced from the Moselle, the quiet family in the old Schloss of Frankenburg assembled as usual at breakfast. The old butler had cut and aired the morning papers--the _Staats Anzeiger_, the _Cologne Gazette_, the _Extra Blatt_, and so forth, and laid them beside the Count. The two young ladies were there in most becoming morning toilets, and there, too, was the Herr Baron Grünthal. The hour was an unusual one for his Excellency to be at Frankenburg, but he had been dining there the evening before; a storm had come on, and, to the infinite annoyance of Ernestine, he had accepted the Count's invitation to remain all night. With the single exception of absurd family pride and the consequent tyranny over Ernestine, the general tenor of the Count's household presented a fair example of German domestic life.