"Well, that old man--Count von Ahlen, you said--received you, heaped logs upon his fire, stanched your wounds, and asked no questions. Well? You stopped suddenly. Tell me all!"
Wogan looked doubtfully at her and then quickly seated himself over against her.
"All? I will. It will be no new thing to you;" and as Clementina raised her eyes curiously to his, he met her gaze and so spoke the rest looking at her with her own direct gaze.
"Why did he ask no question, seeing me disordered, wounded, a bandit, for all he knew, with a murder on my hands? Because thirty years before Count Philip Christopher von Königsmarck had come in just that same way over the lawn to the window, and had sat by that log-fire and charmed the old gentleman into an envy by his incomparable elegance and wit."
"Königsmarck!" exclaimed the girl. She knew the history of that brilliant and baleful adventurer at the Court of Hanover. "He came as you did, and wounded?"
"The Princess Sophia Dorothea was visiting the Duke of Würtemberg," Wogan explained, and Clementina nodded.
"Count Otto von Ahlen, my host," he continued, "had a momentary thought that I was Königsmarck mysteriously returned as he had mysteriously vanished; and through these thirty years' retention of his youth, Count Otto could never think of Königsmarck but as a man young and tossed in a froth of passion. He would have it to the end that I had escaped from such venture as had Königsmarck; he would have it my wounds were the mere offset to a love well worth them; he _would_ envy me. 'Passion,' said he, 'without passion there can be no great thing.'"
"And the saying lived in your thoughts," cried Clementina. "I do not wonder. 'Without passion there can be no great thing!' Can books teach a man so much?"
"Nay, it was an hour's talk with Königsmarck which set the old man's thoughts that way; and though Königsmarck talked never so well, I would not likely infer from his talk an eternal and universal truth. Count Otto left me alone while he fetched me food, and he left me in a panic."
"A panic?" said Clementina, with a little laugh. "You!"
"Yes. That first mistake of me for Königsmarck, that insistence that my case was Königsmarck's--"
"There was a shadow of truth in it--even then?" said Clementina, suddenly leaning across the table towards him. Wogan strove not to see the light of her joy suddenly sparkling in her eyes.