"Come, come," cried the Colonel; "no ghost stories, I beg." But Angelica and Moritz spoke of what their feelings had been on that evening long ago; of their having been so devotedly in love with each other, and unable to help attaching the most overweening importance to every little incident which occurred: how the pure beam of that love of theirs had been reflected by everything, and even the sweet bond of alarm wove itself out of loving, longing hearts--and how the Uncanny Guest, heralded by all the spectral voices of ill-omen, had brought terror upon them. "Does it not seem to you, dearest Moritz," said Angelica, "that the strange tones of the storm-wind, as we hear them now, are speaking to us, only of our love, in the kindliest possible tones?" "Yes! yes!" said Dagobert, "and the singing of the kettle sounds to-night to _me_ much more like a little cradle song than anything eerie." Angelica hid her blushing face on Moritz's breast. And _he_--for his part--clasped his arm round his beautiful wife, and softly whispered, "Is there, here below, a higher bliss than this?" "I see very plainly," said Ottmar, when he had finished, and the friends still sat in gloomy silence, "that my little story has not pleased you particularly, so we had better not say much more about it, but consign it to oblivion." "The very best thing we could do," said Lothair. "And yet," Cyprian said, "I must take up the cudgels for my friend. Of course you will say that I am to some extent mixed up in the matter--that Ottmar has taken a good many of the germs of the story from me, and on this occasion has been cooking in my kitchen, so that you won't be disposed to allow me to be a judge in the case. Yet, unless you mean to condemn everything without the slightest remorse, like so many Rhadamanthuses--you must admit, yourselves, that there is much in Ottmar's story which must be allowed to pass as genuinely Serapiontic; the beginning, for instance." "Quite right," said Theodore; "the party round the tea-table may pass as from the life, as well as many other points during the course of the tale. But, to speak candidly, we have had a very large assortment of spectral characters such as the stranger Count, and it will soon be a difficult matter to go on giving them novelty and originality. He is too much like Alban in 'The Magnetizer.' You know the tale I mean, and indeed that story and Ottmar's have both the same _motif_. Wherefore I wish I might beg our Ottmar and you, Cyprian, to leave monsters of that sort out of the game in future. For Ottmar this will be possible, but for you, Cyprian, I am not so sure that it will. So that we shall have to allow _you_ to serve us up a 'Spook' of the kind now and then, I suppose, only stipulating that it shall be truly Serapiontic, _i.e._ come out of the very inmost depths of your imagination. Moreover 'The Magnetizer' _seems_ rhapsodical, but the 'Uncanny Guest' is rhapsodical in very truth."