The summer heat lay like a film over the afternoon. The hush of the landscape was not even disturbed by the call of a bird or the dry chirp of a cricket. In front of the gateway at which they stood stretched a clear space of rolling turf for one or two hundred paces, at the end of which the grass began to go out of sight beneath short undergrowth and scattered trees, the fringe of a stately woodland. To the right and left of the forester’s lodge the trees gathered in again. Behind, it was approached by a footpath over a widening tract of fields, a tongue of meadow-land thrust into the forest. Far away over the fields, had they looked, rose the faint tower of a church and the signs of a peopled land.
“It is more than two months since he first began coming here,” murmured the young girl, presently. “I wonder who he can be?”
The forester turned his head and smiled, as though there were something in his daughter’s words which caused him secret amusement. Then he took another deep puff at his pipe, and answered—
“It is best not to ask. If he wished us to know he would tell us himself. Take care to please him, without being too curious.”
“I know he comes from the Castle, so he must be one of the gentlemen of the Court,” said Dorothea, speaking slowly, as if to herself. “Who knows? perhaps he is a count.”
As she uttered the word Castle, she raised her eyes, and turned them on an opening in the forest in front, between which and the cottage gate there ran a beaten path. For, a mile and more away through that forest, there rose the royal Castle of Neustadt; and old Franz Gitten was a forester in the service of King Maximilian.
This time Franz spoke more roughly, as if ill pleased with Dorothea’s words.
“It is no business of ours who he is. As long as he likes to come here and drink our cider he is welcome. I tell you not to trouble your head about it.”
Checked in this direction, the girl let a few minutes pass before speaking again.
“I wonder why he comes here so often,” was her next remark. “Surely the wines at the Castle must be better than our cider.”