In a few days the old place was turned inside out; an architect arrived with numbers of workmen, and they all went to work. They began rebuilding in the middle of May, and by the middle of July everything was finished, and the whole castle splendidly furnished ready for the master and mistress, who were not slow in making their appearance, with quantities of servants and numerous guests, mostly officers. There were but a couple of ladies among them. And now began such a life in the castle as no one in Tausens had ever seen before; no emperor and empress could have lived more splendidly. Every evening almost all the windows in the old pile blazed with light, and down from the rocks came floating the sounds of revelry and wild dance-music. In the old baronial hall there was singing and playing and dancing and feasting and carousing until deep into the night. In the mean time nothing was heard of the ghost,--the devil was probably highly content with the goings on, for they were surely far from correct. Why the mistress and the couple of ladies went about in the evenings with their shoulders all bare and never minded the men, but danced and jested with them. The mistress outdid them all: she was the gayest, and was always friendly and kind to her guests, and to the servants, and even to the country-people, to every one except to her husband; he must have felt very uncomfortable in the splendid castle, and he went alone among the mountains as often as he could. Madame, too, often made excursions with her guests, to the waterfalls in the Rothwald valley, to the lake on the Frauenalm, and to other beautiful places, but she never went with her husband. She was a capital mountain-climber, but she was always accompanied by one of the other gentlemen, most often of all by Count Menotti, a younger brother of the former possessor of the castle. The Count and madame were always together, so that even the villagers talked about it. Whether they were right in declaring that there was sinful intercourse between the Count and the lady the postmaster did not know: he had never seen anything wrong, but there was plenty of malicious gossip about them, when one day there came to Tausens a travelling merchant, who said he had known madame before her marriage to Herr von Heydeck.