“Ah; very well.” The soldier shrugged his shoulders and resumed his march.
Grafton stood where he had halted. “May I go on?” he asked.
“Yes; why not?” said the soldier.
“But why did you ask for my passport?”
“It’s in the rules. Pass on or you may get into trouble. You know perfectly well that all are admitted to the park at this season.”
“Then there is a closed season?”
“I don’t know,” said the soldier, crossly. “I never heard of one. It’s in the rules to admit every one from April until December. No one comes the rest of the year. But I don’t suppose he could be shut out if he did. There’s no rule which says so.”
“Then why these rules?”
The soldier gave the profoundly thoughtful frown of those incapable of thought. “I don’t know,” he said. “Soldiers must have rules. Everything must be done by rules, so that it will be done just as it used to be. We’ve had the same rules—oh, hundreds of years. Nothing must be changed. What’s new is bad, what’s old is good.”
Grafton trudged on into the wilderness. The road gradually swept into another road. He saw that it was a circle, a girdle, about a lake which was perhaps four miles long and two miles wide, blue as the sky and mirroring it to its smallest flake of snowy cloud. Opposite him, across the width of the lake, towered and spread The Castle, with turrets and battlements, a vast, irregular mantle of ivy draping part of its old gray front. He could see terraces and lawns of brilliant green, the gaudiness of flower-beds and flowering bushes, red and blue and purple and yellow. “Where Her Serene Highness lives,” he thought.