They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival.  It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best French.  The girl leaned across the stones close beside him.  No one was about.  Driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer something—­he hardly knew what—­of his strange admiration for her.  Almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there.  She was hatless as usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his face, “so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must also like what I do, and what I belong to.”

Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself.  Something in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him.  He knew the fear of embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.

“You will take part in our real life, I mean,” she added softly, with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking.  “You will come back to us.”

Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august.  He saw her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side.  Dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.

“You will, I know,” she repeated, holding him with her eyes.

They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood.  The mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth.  An irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self.

The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone.  He took his courage in both hands.

“Tell me, Ilse,” he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, “what is the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of?  And why is it that the people watch me from morning to night?  Tell me what it all means?  And, tell me,” he added more quickly with passion in his voice, “what you really are—­yourself?”