“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 are named one or the other.”

“So?” said Frau Brandt.  “But is it prudent or seemly for you to talk familiarly with a young man whose name is unknown to you?”

“Why not?” asked Maria Dolores, raising her eyebrows, as if surprised.  “He seems a very harmless young man.  I don’t think he will eat me.  And he is English,—­and I like English people.  And he is intelligent,—­his conversation amuses me.  And he has nice easy, impetuous manners,—­so different from the formality and restraint of Austrian young men.  What can his name matter?”