and remarking: 'It won't be any one who knows me,' stood to let the
carriages pass. In the first were a young lady and a gentleman: the lady
brilliantly fair, an effect of auburn hair and complexion, despite the
signs of a storm that had swept them and had not cleared from her
eyelids. Apparently her maid, a damsel sitting straight up, occupied the
carriage following; and this fresh-faced young person twice quickly and
bluntly bent her head as she was driven by. Potts was unacquainted with
the maid. But he knew the lady well, or well enough for her inattention
to be the bigger puzzle. She gazed at the Black Forest hills in the
steadiest manner, with eyes betraying more than they saw; which solved
part of the puzzle, of course. Her reasons for declining to see him were
exposed by the presence of the gentleman beside her. At the same time,
in so highly bred a girl, a defenceless exposure was unaccountable. Half
a nod and the shade of a smile would have been the proper course; and her
going along on the road to the valley seemed to say it might easily have
been taken; except that there had evidently been a bit of a scene.

Potts ranked Henrietta's beauty far above her cousin Livia's. He was
therefore personally offended by her disregard of him, and her bit of a
scene with the fellow carrying her off did him injury on behalf of his
friend Fleetwood. He dismissed Woodseer curtly. Thirsting more to
gossip than to drink, he took a moody draught of beer at the inn, and by
the aid of a conveyance, hastily built of rotten planks to serve his
needs, and drawn by a horse of the old wars,' as he reported on his
arrival at Baden,--reached that home of the maltreated innocents twenty
minutes before the countess and her party were to start for lunch up the
Lichtenthal. Naturally, he was abused for letting his bird fly: but as
he was shaven, refreshed, and in clean linen, he could pull his shirt-
cuffs and take seat at his breakfast-table with equanimity while Abrane
denounced him.