ugh the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches,
are now holes for the birds to nest in. Tangled creepers have spread
to the very summits of the walls. In the keep, instead of grim men in
armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and
instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments. Only at night, when
the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost
of its old self, high above the river.

After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and
Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by
headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke,
stinging nettles, and strange dogs.

Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each
other. Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with
little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers
drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian's
wife sewing at a garment. Christian said suddenly: "I thought we were
friends."

"Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?"

"You went away without a word; friends don't do that."

Harz bit his lips.

"I don't think you care," she went on with a sort of desperate haste,
"whether you hurt people or not. You have been here all this time
without even going to see your father and mother."

"Do you think they would want to see me?"

Christian looked up.

"It's all been so soft for you," he said bitterly; "you don't
understand."

He turned his head away, and then burst out: "I'm proud to come straight
from the soil--I wouldn't have it otherwise; but they are of 'the
people,' everything is narrow with them--they only understand what they
can see and touch."

"I'm sorry I spoke like that," said Christian softly; "you've never told
me about yourself."

There was something just a little cruel in the way the painter looked
at her, then seeming to feel compunction, he said quickly: "I always
hated--the peasant life--I wanted to get away into the world; I had a
feeling in here--I wanted--I don't know what I wanted! I did run away at
last to a house-painter at Meran. The priest wrote me a letter from my
father--they threw me off; that's all."

Christian's eyes were very bright, her lips moved, like the lips of a
child listening to a story.

"Go on," she said.

"I stayed at Meran two years, till I'd learnt all I could there, then a
brother o