The young Baron von Stalkenberg, who was only styled young in contradistinction to his father, being in his forty-first year, was famous for a handsome person, and for his passionate love of the chase:  of wild boars and wolves he was the deadly enemy.  The Count Otto von Stalkenberg, eleven years his brother’s junior, was famous for nothing but his fiercely-ringed moustache, a habit of eating, and an undue addiction to draughts of Marcobrunen.  Somewhat meager fare, so report ran, was the fashion in the Castle of Stalkenberg—­neither the old baron nor his heir cared for luxury; therefore Count von Otto was sure to be seen at the table d’ hote as often as anybody would invite him, and that was nearly every day, for the Count von Stalkenberg was a high-sounding title, and his baronial father, proprietor of all Stalkenberg, lorded it in the baronial castle close by, all of which appeared very grand and great, and that the English bow down to with an idol’s worship.

Stopping at the Ludwig Bad, the chief hotel in the place, was a family of the name of Crosby.  It consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Crosby, an only daughter, her governess, and two or three servants.  What Mr. Crosby had done to England, or England to him, I can’t say, but he never went near his native country.  For years and years he had lived abroad—­not in any settled place of residence:  they would travel about, and remain a year or two in one place, a year or two in another, as the whim suited them.  A respectable, portly man, of quiet and gentlemanly manners, looking as little like one who need be afraid of the laws of his own land as can be.  Neither is it said or insinuated that he was afraid of them.  A gentleman who knew him had told, many years before, in answer to a doubt, that Crosby was as free to go home and establish himself in a mansion in Piccadilly as the best of them.  But he had lost fearfully by some roguish scheme, like the South Sea Bubble, and could not live in the style he once had done, therefore preferred remaining abroad.  Mrs. Crosby was a pleasant, chatty woman given to take as much gayety as she could get, and Helena Crosby was a remarkably fine grown girl of seventeen.  You might have given her some years on it had you been guessing her age, for she was no child, either in appearance or manners, and never had been.  She was an heiress, too.  An uncle had left her twenty thousand pounds, and at her mother’s death she would have ten thousand more.  The Count Otto von Stalkenberg heard of the thirty thousand pounds, and turned his fierce moustache and his eyes on Miss Helena.

“Thirty thousand pounds and von handsome girls!” cogitated he, for he prided himself upon his English.  “It is just what I have been seeking after.”

He found the rumor touching her fortune to be correct, and from that time was seldom apart from the Crosbys.  They were as pleased to have his society as he was to be in theirs, for was he not the Count von Stalkenberg?  And the other visitors at Stalkenberg looking on with envy, would have given their ears to be honored with a like intimacy.