mple and mademoiselle did most of the conversation, which
related to glimpses of scenery, pine, oak, beech-wood, and lake-water,
until we gained the plateau where the tower stood, when the giant groom
trotted to the front, and worked a clear way for us through a mass of
travelling sight-seers, and she leaned to me, talking quite inaudibly
amid the laughter and chatting. A band of wind instruments burst out.
'This is glorious!' I conceived Temple to cry like an open-mouthed mute.
I found it inspiriting.

The rush of pride and pleasure produced by the music was irresistible. We
marched past the tower, all of us, I am sure, with splendid feelings. A
stone's throw beyond it was the lofty tent; over it drooped a flag, and
flags were on poles round a wide ring of rope guarded by foresters and
gendarmes, mounted and afoot. The band, dressed in green, with black
plumes to their hats, played in the middle of the ring. Outside were
carriages, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback, full of animation;
rustics, foresters, town and village people, men, women, and children,
pressed against the ropes. It was a day of rays of sunshine, now from off
one edge, now from another of large slow clouds, so that at times we and
the tower were in a blaze; next the lake-palace was illuminated, or the
long grey lake and the woods of pine and of bare brown twigs making bays
in it.

Several hands beckoned on our coming in sight of the carriages. 'There he
is, then!' I thought; and it was like swallowing my heart in one solid
lump. Mademoiselle had free space to trot ahead of us. We saw a
tall-sitting lady, attired in sables, raise a finger to her, and nip her
chin. Away the little lady flew to a second carriage, and on again, as
one may when alive with an inquiry. I observed to Temple, 'I wonder
whether she says in her German, "It is my question"; do you remember?'
There was no weight whatever in what I said or thought.

She rode back, exclaiming, 'Nowhere. He is nowhere, and nobody knows. He
will arrive. But he is not yet. Now,' she bent coaxingly down to me, 'can
you not a few words of German? Only a smallest sum! It is the Markgrafin,
my good aunt, would speak wid you, and she can no English-only she is
eager to behold you, and come! You will know, for my sake, some scrap of
German--ja? You will--nicht wahr? Or French? Make your glom-pudding of
it, will you?'

I made a shocking plum-pudding of it. Temple was no happier.

The margravine, a fi