‘I have always loved Hilda,’ he said, avoiding her eyes resolutely. ‘Ever since I first remember your bringing her to Greifenstein. We were very small, and it must have been in the spring, for we picked mayflowers and found strawberries in the woods.’
‘She was not more than six years old then,’ observed Frau von Sigmundskron.
‘And I was eleven, I think,’ replied Greif, forgetting his effort to be silent in the childish reminiscence. ‘Was that the first time you came?’
‘I believe so. It was four years after we came to live in Sigmundskron.’
‘Why did you not come sooner?’ Greif asked. It seemed to him that it would be wise to keep the conversation upon the doings of twelve years ago. Another mile of the road was passed, and he was still unshaken.
‘There were many reasons,’ answered the baroness. ‘We had not always been on the best of terms, perhaps because we had scarcely ever met, and I did not care to seem to be forcing my acquaintance upon my relations, so I stayed away for a while. After all, what really brought us together more than anything else, was the fondness of you two children for each other, which showed itself from the first. They brought you to see Hilda, and then we went to your house again—and so—gradually—’
‘I remember that Hilda wore a blue frock the first time she came,’ remarked Greif quickly, with an attempt to check the baroness’s advance towards present times. The intention was so evident that she could not help smiling a little under her hood, and reflecting with some satisfaction that upon this subject, at least, she was more than a match for him.
‘Perhaps she did,’ she answered. ‘I remember that she once had a blue frock.’
The triviality of what they were saying to each other struck Greif all at once, as compared with the horror of what they had left behind them at Greifenstein. It was but the third day since that fearful catastrophe had darkened his life, and he was exchanging remarks about the clothes Hilda had worn when she was a child. He thought he must be shamefully heartless, unless he were going mad, which, considering his words, seemed probable to himself. He leaned back again, and stared absently at the moving landscape. It seemed to him that his father’s spirit was gliding along, high in the black trees beside the road, like mighty Wodin in the northern forests, watching the son he had left behind and listening to the foolish words that fell from his lips. The baroness attributed the sudden chill of his manner, and the gloomy look on his face to another cause.
‘That was very long ago,’ she said, taking advantage of his silence. ‘Since then, Hilda has grown up, and you have become a man, and the love that began when you were children has—’