“And when you saw it on my finger you thought—just for a moment—that I was he, didn’t you, Minna? But then, as I am your uncle I cannot be the Prince of Kronfeld, so we will take it off and wear it no more,” Grey concluded, slipping the golden circlet from his finger and stowing it away in a pocket of his waistcoat.
“But what I should like to know,” continued the Fraülein, “is how it came on the floor of your room?”
“And so should I,” her companion echoed; “how it got out of the casket, and the iron chest, and the travelling box.”
Presently the sound of many shuffling feet was borne to their ears, accompanied by the discordant piping of high-pitched voices, and turning their heads they saw approaching an army of tourists with a gesticulating, haranguing guide in the lead.
“It’s a case of ‘follow the man from Cook’s,’” Grey observed, annoyed at having their privacy invaded. “We had better stroll on.”
They walked rapidly for a while, keeping always to the right, until they were out of sight and sound of the disturbing company, and then they dawdled from terrace to terrace; leaned over lichen-stained marble balustrades to see their reflections in the dark, silent pools; loitered on banks of mossy turf beneath the shade of towering trees; stopped to admire, to criticise, and not infrequently to laugh over the sculptures that dotted the way, and came out at length upon an avenue, long and straight and level and gleaming white in the afternoon sunshine.
“You want to see the Trianons, of course,” Grey suggested to the girl. “I know you are familiar with many of the events that took place there.”
And so, turning to the left, they sauntered on until they came to the one-story horse-shoe shaped villa that Louis XIV built for Madame de Maintenon. But Minna was tired of sight-seeing, and the porcelains and the pictures proved alike uninteresting. The Petit Trianon pleased her much better because of its associations with Marie Antoinette, who had been one of her school-girl heroines, and over its delightful English-looking garden she grew enthusiastic.
They strolled along the winding paths, dallied on the shore of the funny little artificial lake, and rested for a while in the “Temple de l’Amour.” The number of visitors, however, was to both of them a disturbing influence. They would have liked the place to themselves, but they were at every turn running into couples and parties whose presence, as Grey put it, “spoiled the picture.”
They had just emerged from that group of homely, quaint cottages in a far corner of the garden where the fair ladies of Louis’s Court were wont to play at peasant life, when the rippling laughter of women and the more hearty if less musical merriment of men broke jarringly upon their hearing.