"Marguerite be hanged (if I may use such an expression)," said Moritz. "If Angelica loves me--and ah! I can't believe, quite, that she does--I am the happiest and the most blest of men, and care nothing about all the Marguerites in the world, nor their foolishnesses neither. But another fear has come into my mind. This uncanny, stranger Count, who came in amongst us like some dark, gloomy mystery--doesn't he seem to place himself, somehow, most hostilely between her and me? I feel, I scarce know how, as if some reminiscence came forward out of the dark background--I could almost describe it as a dream--which reminiscence, or dream, whichever it may be, brings this Count to my memory under terrible circumstances of some sort. I feel as though, wherever he makes his appearance, some awful misfortune must come flashing out of the depths of the darkness as a result of his conjurations. Did you notice how often his eyes rested on Angelica, and how, when they did, a feeble flush tinted his pallid cheeks, and disappeared again rapidly? The monster has designs upon my darling; and that is why the words which he addressed to me sounded so insulting. But I will oppose him and resist him to the very death!" Dagobert said the Count was a supernatural sort of fellow, no doubt, with something very eery and spectral about him, and that it would be as well to keep a sharp look-out on his proceedings, though, perhaps, he thought there was less in, or behind, him than one would suppose; and that the uncanny feelings which everybody had experienced with regard to him were chiefly attributable to the excited state in which they had all been when he made his appearance. "Let us face all this disquieting affair," said Dagobert, "with firm courage and unshakable confidence. No dark power will bend the head which holds itself up with true bravery and indomitable resolution." A considerable time had elapsed. The Count, whose visits to the Colonel's house increased in frequency, had rendered himself almost indispensable. It was universally agreed, now, that the accusation against him of being uncanny recoiled on those who made it. "He might very well have styled us uncanny people, with our white faces and odd behaviour," as said Madame von G----. Everything he said evinced a store of the most valuable and various information; and although, being an Italian, he spoke with a foreign accent, his command of the German language was most perfect and fluent. His narratives had a fire which bore the hearers irresistibly along, so that even Moritz and Dagobert, hostile as were their feelings to this stranger, forgot their repugnance to him when he talked, and when a pleasant smile broke out over his pale, but handsome and expressive face, and they hung upon his lips, like Angelica and the others.