Page:Legends of Rubezahl, and Other Tales (1845).djvu/256

 what tunes Lucretia pleased, and no others. Pretty faces throughout the palace became exceedingly pinched and yellow with spite and envy, at the progress of an amour which at once annihilated any idea their fair owners had formed of achieving, or of having achieved, the conquest of the Count. And so it was; the Count gave up, in favour of the lovely Bamburger, all his other little affairs of the heart, and she set the rest of her admirers at liberty, reserving all her artillery for the Count.

A month passed on, and the affair had proceeded to the satisfaction of both parties. But now approached the time when the one or the other was to be held up to public ridicule, while the conqueror was to shine in all that brilliancy which so signal a victory must confer. In the outset, the vanity of the Count had designed nothing more than a display of his superiority to all his competitors, after which it was his purpose, leaving Lucretia to wear the willow, to fly to other conquests. His rivals were indeed dismissed, but meantime Dan Cupid, who seldom permits people to play tricks with him unpunished, had turned the Count’s jest into downright earnest, by inflicting that wound in his heart which he at first only feigned to be there. The fair Lucretia had really and truly made a conquest of him, and he was now as fast chained to her triumphal car as the most sentimental of her other admirers. Her aim