"You are not like me, Maurice," said Count Victor. "These things pass lightly over you. You take the good and leave the evil. I wish I had been made like you—or rather, I wish I had never been born at all," said the young man, bitterly. "And what would become of me without you, my poor Victor, my other self?" said Maurice, pressing his brother's arm. "Remember, I have had no such crushing sorrow as yours. I wish I could comfort you." "There is no comfort—none—either in heaven or on earth," said Victor, passionately. "Nothing can ever give me back my Emma or undo the wrong which this horrible royal punctilio has done us both." "Yet Emma herself found comfort," observed Maurice. "Emma was a believer," answered his brother. "Maurice, I would cut off my right hand before I would say a word to shake the faith of a child in the Christian religion. Those who do so are like a man who should rob another in the desert of his water-skins, promising him wine instead, and then leave him to perish of thirst. But come, we should be returning to the Schloss." "What say you to going to church?" asked Maurice. "I hear the old missionary is to preach." Victor agreed, and the brothers returned to the lodge. CHAPTER III. _THE COUNT'S VISIT._ SERVICE-TIME found the little church of Nonnenwald filled to its utmost capacity, which was not very great, so that some of the men had to sit on the step of the pulpit or find an uneasy perch on the two or three altar-shaped tomb; which made the small space within the walls still smaller. All the country-people came to church, for the tidings of the wolf-hunt had spread far and wide, and every one wished to hear the news and discuss the capture. There was some staring when Gertrude Reinhart in her deep mourning-veil entered the seat which she had not occupied for four years, and more when the counts Maurice and Victor came in and sat down in the pastor's pew. But the staring was nothing to that which ensued when Brother Gotthold, the Moravian missionary, ascended the pulpit in place of the old Lutheran pastor. Such a thing had never happened before during all the fifty years of Doctor Martin Fisher's pastorate. In a few words Brother Gotthold explained the matter: "Your respected pastor, I regret to say, is too ill this morning to leave the house; and as it seemed a pity to dismiss the congregation without a discourse, he has asked me to fill his place, which I shall do as well as I am able." "He may well say that," whispered the schoolmaster to the shoemaker. "I say it is a scandal for a wandering preacher to be asked into the pulpit when there are those in the parish who could fill it with some credit. I don't know what the consistory will say, for my part. It is just an offshoot of French infidelity—that's what it is."