"Perhaps you draw?" Magelone asked further.
"No, I do not. I have no talent at all," Johanna declared, with some mortification.
"None at all?" the Freiherr said, and his eyes gleamed brightly over his newspaper. "Actually none? So much the better, child, so much the better!"
Johanna understood the meaning of such words from her grandfather. This was the gulf that separated them.
CHAPTER VI.
THE FREIHERR'S PRINCIPLES.
When the next morning Johanna went to her window, she could not repress an exclamation of delight. Her room looked from a gable of the castle out into the park. In front of it an aged oak stretched its gnarled limbs above a little clearing; around it stood magnificent hemlocks, their boughs drooping to the ground beneath a weight of snow; while on the right the only vista through the trees afforded a view of the snowy roofs and the little church of the village in the valley, of a row of stunted willows, probably marking the course of a stream, and of the wooded mountain-sides crowned by curiously-jagged rocks.
It was a peaceful landscape, such as she loved, and had the added charm of the brilliant sunlight shining upon the glittering snow in the clear wintry atmosphere. It attracted her irresistibly to go out into the open air. The breakfast-hour was nine o'clock: she had half an hour to spare; and she wrapped herself up and hurried out into the park.
She soon found a pathway, but walking on the dry snow was hard work, and she had to return long before the limits of the park had been reached.