Perhaps I dared not then to admit even to my own soul wherefore I let myself linger into the winter at this meanly famed and dull town of Wittenberg; yet in the after days I think I knew the reason,--Gräfin Ilsa was still in the city. The young gräfin had unfolded as a rosebud under the sun in the genial warmth of her kinsfolk’s cultured home,--so different from the tawdry savagery of Schloss Blankenburg. What to me was a small and stupid town, was to her a thriving and delightful metropolis. The gallant attentions of the official folk of the city were as charming and unaccustomed to her as they were commonplace to me. Less and less she seemed the grave nun, or the chattering mountain maiden, and more and more the noblewoman--the bearer of a long and honored, if slightly tarnished name. Stately and wise she seemed, and grew more so day by day, taking the pleasant homage as her rightful due, until I heard two under-captains swearing over their wine that “The Gräfin of Blankenburg was handsome as the new snow, but,--holy St. Agatha!--equally cold to all their gallantries.” A fact, however, which left them still her slaves. Only to one person she never showed the well-moderated hauteur she displayed to the others. That person was myself. As far as I could discover, she regarded me as almost on an equality with her brother,--a kind of kinsman, or even cousin, to treat with all manner of confidences, without the need of any great thing to follow. “Are we not both from the Harzland, and are not Blankenburg and Regenstein very near?” she said once, as in kind of apology for repeating the over-polite remarks of a certain Von Benningen at a recent skating party on the marshes by the Elbe. “You are very happy in Wittenberg these days, Ilsa?” said I. (We had dropped formal titles between ourselves, long since.) “Of course. It is all as a new world to me. Am I disloyal to the Harzland in preferring a winter here to the dreary mountain snow and cold? But I will tell you something. Listen close.” A disagreeable sensation seized me. She was about to confess an admiration for some more notable ritter than Von Benningen. Why, however, that should trouble me, I really did not understand. “I am listening,” I rejoined. “Well, then. It is Dr. Martin’s sermons. A letter from Aunt Theckla says she fears he is an unwise and heretical man, but I know even she must be wrong. I hear him every day he preaches in the Pfarr-kirche. I cannot understand all that he says, at least not to repeat it. But somehow his words are like the cool cloth that was laid on my forehead whilst I burned with the fever. I go away feeling so comforted!” “And how comforted?” I asked, slightly amused.