'Apparently he passes half or all the night in the open air everywhere,'
said the margravine.

I glanced hurriedly over both faces. The margravine was snuffing her
nostrils up contemptuously. The princess had vividly reddened. Her face
was luminous over the nest of white fur folding her neck.

'Yes, I must have the taste for it: for when I was a child,' said I,
plunging at anything to catch a careless topic, 'I was out in my father's
arms through a winter night, and I still look back on it as one of the
most delightful I have ever known. I wish I could describe the effect it
had on me. A track of blood in the snow could not be brighter.'

The margravine repeated,

'A track of blood in the snow! My good young man, you have excited forms
of speech.'

I shuddered. Ottilia divined that her burning blush had involved me.
Divination is fiery in the season of blushes, and I, too, fell on the
track of her fair spirit, setting out from the transparent betrayal by
Schwartz of my night-watch in the pine-wood near the Traun river-falls.
My feelings were as if a wave had rolled me helpless to land, at the
margravine's mercy should she put another question. She startled us with
a loud outburst of laughter.

'No! no man upon this earth but Roy could have sat that horse I don't
know how many minutes by the clock, as a figure of bronze,' she
exclaimed.