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