He had returned in the midst of his success to make an honourable offer of marriage, and he had been refused,--because he was a plebeian, forsooth! And he knew also that the woman he loved was breaking her heart for him.
What wonder that he set his teeth, and said to himself that she should be his, at any price! Nino has no absurd ideas about the ridicule that attaches to loving a woman, and taking her if necessary.

He has not been trained up in the heart of the wretched thing they call society, which ruined me long ago.

What he wants he asks for, like a child, and if it is refused, and his good heart tells him that he has a right to it, he takes it like a man, or like what a man was in the old time before the Englishman discovered that he is an ape.

Ah, my learned colleagues, we are not so far removed from the ancestral monkey but that there is serious danger of our shortly returning to that primitive and caudal state! And I think that my boy and the Prussian officer, as they sat on their beasts and bowed, and smiled, and offered to fight each other, or to shake hands, each desiring to oblige the other, like a couple of knights of the old ages, were a trifle farther removed from our common gorilla parentage than some of us.
But it grew dark, and Nino caught his mule and rode slowly back to the town, wondering what would happen before the sun rose on the other side of the world.

Now, lest you fail to understand wholly how the matter passed, I must tell you a little of what took place during the time that Nino was waiting for the count, and Hedwig was alone in the castle with Baron Benoni.