her into
the long, low, white-walled, red-roofed pavilion. He was conscious of a
sudden change in things, and of a sudden acute and bitter depression
within himself.

"These are great larks," he said; "great larks while they last,--but
what's the good of them in the end? What do they lead to? What's the
good of coquetting with blisses that can't be yours?" And he breathed a
prodigious sigh. "When shall I see her again?" he asked, and thereupon
was seized by his old terror--his terror of yesterday, though it seemed
to him a terror he had known all his life--lest he should never see her
again. "She's only a visitor. What's to prevent her leaving this very
night?"

The imagination was intolerable. He entered the Castle court, and
climbed the staircase of honour, and rambled through the long suites of
great empty rooms, empty of everything save the memory of the past and
the portraits of the dead, there, if he might, for a time at least, to
lose himself and to forget her.

V

"Who is the young man you have been talking with so long?" asked Frau
Brandt, as Maria Dolores came into her sitting-room, a vast, square,
bare room, with a marble floor and a painted ceiling, with Venetian
blinds to shelter it from the sun, and a bitter-sweet smell, as of
rosemary or I know not what other aromatic herb, upon its cool air.

"Oh? You saw us?" said Maria Dolores, answering the question with
question.

"Him I have seen many times--every day for a week at least," said Frau
Brandt. "But I never before saw you talking with him. Who is he?" She
was a small, brown, square-built, black-haired, homely-featured old
woman, in a big, round starched white cap and a flowing black silk gown.
She sat in an uncushioned oaken armchair by the window, with some
white knitting in her bony, blunt-fingered brown hands, and
tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles on her nose. But the spectacles
couldn't hide the goodness or the soundness or the sweetness that looked
forth from her motherly old honest brown eyes.

"He is a young man who lives _en pension_ at the presbytery," said Maria
Dolores, "a young Englishman."

"So?" said Frau Brandt. "What is his name?"

"I don't know," said Maria Dolores, with disengagement real or feigned.
"His Christian name, I believe, is John."

"But his family name?" persisted Frau Brandt.

"It is probably Brown, Jones, or Robinson," said Maria Dolores. "Or it
may even be Black, Smith, or Johnson. Most Englishmen ar