to her there. The
suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and her old
father and she were aware of one another without conversing in speech. He
pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger for the
solitudes of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling. He would not
let a sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea forward disturb
the scene. A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing
comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of
long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as
well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the
yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out,
with a strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy
and ferns; he saw what his girl saw. Power of heart was her conjuring
magician.

She climbed to the rock-slabs above. This was too easily done. The poor
bit of effort excited her frame to desire a spice of danger, her walk was
towering in the physical contempt of a mountain girl for petty lowland
obstructions. And it was just then, by the chance of things--by the
direction of events, as Dame Gossip believes it to be--while colour,
expression, and her proud stature marked her from her sex, that a
gentleman, who was no other than Lord Fleetwood, passed Carinthia, coming
out of the deeper pine forest.

Some distance on, round a bend of the path, she was tempted to adventure
by a projected forked head of a sturdy blunted and twisted little
rock-fostered forest tree pushing horizontally for growth about thirty
feet above the lower ground. She looked on it, and took a step down to
the stem soon after.

Fleetwood had turned and followed, merely for the final curious peep at
an unexpected vision; he had noticed the singular shoot of thick timber
from the rock, and the form of the goose-neck it rose to, the sprout of
branches off the bill in the shape of a crest. And now a shameful spasm
of terror seized him at sight of a girl doing what he would have dreaded
to attempt. She footed coolly, well-balanced, upright. She seated
herself.

And there let her be. She was a German girl, apparently. She had an air
of breeding, something more than breeding. German families of the nobles
give out, here and there, as the Great War showed examples of, intrepid
young women, who have the sharp lines of character to render them
independent of the grace