Wogan spoke his thought aloud,-- "Yet I might be any hedgerow rascal with a taste for your plate, and no particular scruples as to a life or two lying in the way of its gratification." The Count smiled.
"Your visit is not so unexampled as you are inclined to think.

Nearly thirty years ago a young man as you are came in just such a plight as you and stood outside this window at two o'clock of a dark morning.

Even so early in my life I was at my books," and he smiled rather sadly.

"I let him in and he talked to me for an hour of matters strange and dreamlike, and enviable to me.

I have never forgotten that hour, nor to tell the truth have I ever ceased to envy the man who talked to me during it, though many years since he suffered a dreadful doom and vanished from among his fellows.