‘It was an impertinence,’ snapped out the Baron, his protruding eyes taking on a scandalised expression; ‘fancy the woman talking like that at our table. She almost told us we were nobodies, and I don’t believe a word of it. She is just Schmidt and nothing more. She has been talking to some of the peasants about the old Cernogratz family, and raked up their history and their stories.’

‘She wants to make herself out of some consequence,’ said the Baroness; ‘she knows she will soon be past work and she wants to appeal to our sympathies. Her grandfather, indeed!’

The Baroness had the usual number of grandfathers, but she never, never boasted about them.

‘I dare say her grandfather was a pantry boy or something of the sort in the castle,’ sniggered the Baron; ‘that part of the story may be true.’

The merchant from Hamburg said nothing; he had seen tears in the old woman’s eyes when she spoke of guarding her memories—or, being of an imaginative disposition, he thought he had.

‘I shall give her notice to go as soon as the New Year festivities are over,’ said the Baroness; ‘till then I shall be too busy to manage without her.’

But she had to manage without her all the same, for in the cold biting weather after Christmas, the old governess fell ill and kept to her room.

‘It is most provoking,’ said the Baroness, as her guests sat round the fire on one of the last evenings of the dying year; ‘all the time that she has been with us I cannot remember that she was ever seriously ill, too ill to go about and do her work, I mean. And now, when I have the house full, and she could be useful in so many ways, she goes and breaks down. One is sorry for her, of course, she looks so withered and shrunken, but it is intensely annoying all the same.’

‘Most annoying,’ agreed the banker’s wife sympathetically; ‘it is the intense cold, I expect, it breaks the old people up. It has been unusually cold this year.’

‘The frost is the sharpest that has been known in December for many years,’ said the Baron.

‘And, of course, she is quite old,’ said the Baroness; ‘I wish I had given her notice some weeks ago, then she would have left before this happened to her. Why, Wappi, what is the matter with you?’

The small, woolly lapdog had leapt suddenly down from its cushion and crept shivering under the sofa. At the same moment an outburst of angry barking came from the dogs in the castle-yard, and other dogs could be heard yapping and barking in the distance.

‘What is disturbing the animals?’ asked the Baron.

And then the humans, listening intently, heard the sound that had roused the dogs to their demonstrations of fear and rage; heard a long-drawn whining howl, rising and falling, seeming at one moment leagues away, at others sweeping across the snow until it appeared to come from the foot of the castle walls. All the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting melodies to which one could give no name, seemed concentrated in that wailing cry.

‘Wolves!’ cried the Baron.

Their music broke forth in one raging burst, seeming to come from everywhere.

‘Hundreds of wolves,’ said the Hamburg merchant, who was a man of strong imagination.