? or
separated, and forcibly free? Under such conditions Ottilia would not
have commanded my return but what was I to imagine? A boiling couple of
hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I meditated, I
could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned to wait on me,
and hear whether the English lady was a Fraulein. The Margravine and
Prince Ernest were absent. Hermann worked in his museum, displaying his
treasures to Colonel Heddon. I sat with the ladies in the airy look-out
tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense speculations, which devoured
themselves and changed from fire to smoke, while I recounted the
adventures of our ship's voyage, and they behaved as if there were
nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the secret I thirsted
for. I should not certainly have thirsted much if Janet had met me as far
half-way as a delicate woman may advance. The mystery lay in her evident
affection, her apparent freedom and unfathomable reserve, and her desire
that I should see Temple before she threw off her feminine armour, to
which, judging by the indications, Ottilia seemed to me to accede.

My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding dilatorily
over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages sent to meet
him. He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of minutes with his
trumpery 'How d' ye do's,' and his glances and excuses, and then I had
him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not Temple's fault if he
did not begin straightforwardly.

I plucked him from his narrator's vexatious and inevitable commencement:
'Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?'

He answered 'Yes!'

'She did? Then she's a widow?'

'No, she isn't,' said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead I
distracted him by taking.

'Then her husband's alive?'

Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in
the dialogue.

'Was she married?'

Temple said 'No,' with a lurking drollery about his lips. He added, 'It
's nothing to laugh over, Richie.'

'Am I laughing? Speak out. Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any
way?'

Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical: he
confessed it, and accused me of the provocation. He dashed some laughter
with gravity to prepare for my next assault.

'Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage? Did he decline it?'

'No,' was the answer once more.

Temple stopped my wrath by catchin