d they had passed the same sentry, had told her that he was the lover
of Johanna Elizabetha's waiting-maid, the woman who had always been so
insolent to Wilhelmine at the castle. 'He would do me harm, that lout, if
he could,' Wilhelmine reflected as she walked on, and the man's frowning
face haunted her for a time, but soon the freshness of the evening breeze
and the garden's beauty drove all unquiet thoughts from her mind.

She wandered slowly through the trees of the pheasant garden, pausing a
moment to look at the gorgeous plumage of the birds in their gilded
cages. Then she came to the rosery shut off from the rest of the garden
by tall beech-trees, where splashed the fountain near the marble seat on
which the lovers had sat together after the theatricals, and where
Eberhard Ludwig had agonised when she was hidden in the Judengasse. She
passed the new Lusthaus, and looked up with a sigh at the balcony where
Serenissimus and she had stood together, and he had told her Forstner
called him a ridiculous poet fellow, because he loved the starlit woods
at night. She came to the famous fourteenth-century maze, where the
cypress-trees had grown so high and dense that it was really a place to
lose oneself in, did one not possess the clue to the intricate windings.
She walked outside the maze, breathing in the fragrance of the sun-kissed
cypress, and turned into the orangery, and here she lingered a while in
the alleys of formally cut trees. Then she walked on, and finally gained
the wilderness which surrounded the famous grotto; this was a long
construction of rocks and shells, very quaint, no doubt, in the days when
it was built, yet Time had further enchanted it, adding melancholy and
mystery to the half-ruined place. There was a deep, stagnant tank before
the grotto, covered with weeds and growing things. In the centre of this
tank, among lusty nymphs and playful dolphins, a huge Triton sat on his
rocky throne, and from his trident a few drops of water still oozed
slowly.

The elaborate waterworks and strange devices could not be quite unhinged,
Wilhelmine reflected idly. She recollected how Eberhard Ludwig had shown
her the grotto's marvellous springs and tricks; she recalled how, after
much heaving and turning at an iron lever, the whole grotto had suddenly
been converted into a place of living waters. She wondered if the works
were still more rusty now; how sad a waste that this curious old-world
pleasantry should be a