When the music ceased, he fancied for an instant that some accident had befallen the musicians. Then, when he realized that the end of the dance had come in its due time, he remembered with pleasure a rule of his court, established in the days of those who had been before him. After each dance an interval of ten minutes was allowed before the beginning of another. Ten minutes are not much to a man who has things to say which could hardly be said in ten hours; still, they are something; and to waste even one would be like spilling a drop of precious elixir from a tiny bottle containing but nine other drops.
They had scarcely spoken yet, except for commonplaces which any one might have overheard, since the day on the mountain; and in this first moment of the ten, each was wondering whether or no that day should be ignored between them. Leopold did not feel that it should be spoken of, for it was possible that the girl did not recognize the chamois hunter in the Emperor; and Virginia did not feel that she could speak of it. But then, few things turn out as people feel they should.
Next to the throne room was the ball-room; and beyond was another known as the “Waldsaal,” which Leopold had fitted up for the gratification of a fancy. It was named the “Waldsaal” because it represented a wood. Walls and ceiling were masked with thick-growing creepers trained over invisible wires, through which peeped stars of electric light, like the chequerings of sunshine between netted branches. Trees grew up, with their roots in boxes hidden beneath the moss-covered floor. There were grottoes of ivy-draped rock in the corners, and here and there out from leafy shadows glittered the glass eyes of birds and animals—eagles, stags, chamois, wolves and bears—which the Emperor had shot.
This strange room, so vast as to seem empty when dozens of people wandered beneath its trees and among its rock grottoes, was thrown open to guests whenever a ball was given at the palace; but the conservatories and palm houses were more popular; and when Leopold brought Miss Mowbray to the Waldsaal after their dance, it was in the hope that they might not be disturbed.
She was lovelier than ever in her white dress, under the trees, looking up at him with a wonderful look in her eyes, and the young man’s calmness was mastered by the beating of his blood.
“This is a kind of madness,” he said to himself. “It will pass. It must pass.” And aloud,—meaning all the while to say something different and commonplace,—the real words in his mind broke through the crust of conventionality. “Why did you do it?”
Virginia’s eyes widened. “I don’t understand.” Then, in an instant, she found that she did understand. She knew, too, that the question had asked itself in spite of him, but that once it had been uttered he would stand to his guns.
“I mean the thing I shall have to thank you for always.”
If Virginia had had time to think, she might have prepared some pretty answer; but, there being no time, her response came as his question had, from the heart. “I couldn’t help doing it.”