"Well, Kitty?" he called out to the young girl upon her entrance, directing her attention by a wave of his hand, as he spoke, to all that he had effected.
She paused upon the threshold, a black veil thrown loosely over her golden-brown braids, her eyes full of laughter, her young frame vigorous and supple as if sprung from the giant knights Von Baumgarten.
"Most romantic, Moritz! The illusion is perfect!" she answered, gaily. "That fellow down there," and she pointed through the nearest window to the gleaming girdle of water, "might terrify us with his martial air, did we not know that a councillor of commerce of the nineteenth century sits within his circle."
He contracted his fine eyebrows, and cast from beneath them a dubious glance at her face. She did not notice it. "It certainly was hardly fair to grow turnips and cabbages in the bed of the fosse," she continued. "I see that now, although the ’little valley’ was a favoured spot in my remembrance. Still, it is a strange and interesting fact, that the merchant of to-day renews the barriers which even former knightly lords of the soil wearied of and at last destroyed as superfluous."
"Do not forget, my dear Kitty, that I myself now belong among these latter," he replied, in a tone of considerable pique. "It is sad to think that an ancient race should so adapt itself to the spirit of the age as ruthlessly to abolish old and honourable customs and institutions. It is a crying outrage upon us, their successors."
"Idiot! He is more Catholic than the Pope," Henriette muttered, angrily. She advanced farther into the room, while Kitty mechanically closed the door behind her without averting her half-startled, half-thoughtful gaze from her brother-in-law. As a child she had, in common with all who came in contact with him, been very fond of him. His father had been an honest, hard-working mechanic, and Moritz, left an orphan at an early age, of striking personal beauty and ingratiating address, had been received as an underling in the establishment of the wealthy banker Mangold, whose daughter he eventually married. Kitty knew how devoted he had been to her sister Clotilde until she died; she had always seen him submissive even to servility to her father, and he had been uniformly amiable and kind even towards those beneath him; and yet there was now hovering about those finely-chiselled lips a distinctly-stamped expression of arrogance. The ropemaker’s son was contemptuously overthrowing the ladder by which he had climbed thus high, and was so dazzled by his good fortune that he fell naturally into the jargon of a genuine country squire.