"She was afraid of the long rough path," the latter replied, "and preferred to drive."
"Well, I suppose you will hardly leave Helene to be lifted out of the carriage by the old Count Wildenau; I cannot understand how, as her faithful knight, you could leave the principal path. A few, quick steps will enable you to rejoin her. I will not prevent you from doing so," said Herr von Walde sharply, while a sarcastic smile quivered around the corners of his mouth. He stepped aside with Elizabeth to allow the pair to pass.
"And pray, if one may ask, why did you leave the principal path yourself?" asked Fräulein von Quittelsdorf flippantly, much more like a pert chamber-maid than a maid of honour.
"That you can easily learn; simply because I hoped, by coming along this lonely path, to escape the eloquent tongues of certain ladies," replied Herr von Walde drily.
"Ah, how cross you are! Heaven shield us from such an irritable birthday hero!" cried the lady, shuddering, and retreating a few paces with a comical assumption of terror. "It was a mistake that we did not come to you to-day with funereal faces, and muffled to the eyes in black crape!"
She pouted, and, taking Hollfeld's arm, would have dragged him forward; but he, strangely enough, seemed inclined, for the first time in his life, to set his cousin's wishes at defiance. He walked on slowly, and as if weary of existence, peering right and left into the bushes, apparently intensely interested in every stone in the pathway, every squirrel that ran swiftly past. Then he began a conversation with his companion, whose answers absorbed his attention so entirely that he paused and stood still to listen to them.
Herr von Walde muttered something between his teeth; Elizabeth could not understand it; but the hostile glance that he cast after his cousin showed how the behaviour of the latter incensed him. He said not another word to her. He turned slowly towards her, and she felt that he continued to regard her steadfastly, but she was unable to lift her eyes to his. Had she done so he must have discovered on the spot how greatly she was moved by the strange words that he had just whispered to her with so much emotion in his voice. One look would have betrayed the conflict within her, and then,—she could not pursue the thought,—he would doubtless have repented the simple wish that he had expressed. Thus deeply agitated, it was natural enough that the young girl's eyelids fell low over her eyes, and that she failed to observe the inaudible sigh that escaped her companion, or mark how all signs of irritation vanished from his features to give place to the shade of melancholy that was so wont to rest upon his brow.
A faint and dying trumpet note, which was doubtless the result of the impatience of the musicians who were waiting upon the roof of the tower, betrayed the close vicinity of the scene of festivity. And soon a buzz and noise, as of some neighbouring gypsy encampment, broke upon their ears; the path grew broader, gay throngs were seen fluttering through the bushes, and suddenly a loud flourish of bugles and trumpets sounded over their heads. Elizabeth availed herself of the opportunity to slip her hand from the arm of her conductor and to lose herself in the crowd that gathered around the lord of the feast; while a young girl, habited as a Dryad, and accompanied by four other wood-nymphs, approached, and, in limping hexameters, welcomed him to the forest.
"Well, von Walde has gotten rid of his Dulcinea at the right moment. I don't see the girl at all, now," the Countess Falkenberg whispered smilingly to Count Wildenau, who was sitting beside her upon a kind of raised dais, beneath the shade of a group of oaks. "He will never forgive the baroness and our flippant Cornelia for so stupidly forcing him into playing the knight, even for a few moments, to such a creature. My child," and she turned to Helene; seated at her right, who was anxiously searching the crowd with troubled eyes, "when those people release him we must take him in here among us, and do everything in our power to make him forget the provoking beginning of the festival."
Helene nodded mechanically. Apparently she had only heard half of what the lady had whispered in her ear. Her poor little figure, enveloped in a heavy, light-blue silk, leaned helplessly and wearily back in her huge armchair, and her cheeks were whiter than the lily-wreath that crowned her brow.'