this agelong silence? Here's dust enough for all to see. And all this
ruin, this inhospitable peace!"

Prince Ennui glanced strangely at me.

"I assure you, O suddenly enkindled," he said in his suave, monotonous
voice, "it is not for _my_ indifference he does not come. I would
willingly sleep; these--my dear sister, all these old fineries and
love-jinglers would as fain wake." He turned away his treacherous eyes
from me. "Maybe the Lorelei hath snared him!..." he said, smiling.

I relished not at all the thought of sleeping in this mansion of
sleep. Yet it seemed politic to refrain from giving offence to fangs
apparently so eager to take it. Accordingly I followed this Ennui to a
loftier chamber yet that he suggested for me.

Once there, however, and his soft footfall passed away, I looked about
me, first to find a means for keeping trespassers from coming in, and
next to find a means for getting myself out.

It was a long and arduous, but not a perilous, descent from the window
by the thick-grown greenery that cumbered the walls. But I determined
to wait awhile before venturing,--wait, too, till I could see plainly
where Rosinante had made her night-quarters. By good fortune I
discovered her beneath the greenish moon that hung amid mist above the
forest, stretching a disconsolate neck at the waterside as if in
search of the Lorelei.

When, as it seemed to me, it must be nearing dawn, though how the
hours flitted so swiftly passed my comprehension, I very cautiously