And Johannes began:
"Ah, scarlet geranium, blossom true!
Ah, lovely lobelia blue!
Why look those eyes so earnestly?
Why thus bedight,
This morning bright
With glistening tears of dew?
"Oh, do you still think of the olden days...."
Again he broke down, and gazed silently out before him, with sorrowful eyes.
"Are you going to finish it, Jo?" asked Marjon with quiet deference. "You just stay here, I shall get on very well alone. See if I don't!"
And she returned to the fashionable, general promenade, with Keesje, her plates, her eggs, and her apples.
Then Johannes looked up, and suddenly saw before him something so charming and captivating that he became conscious of an entirely new sensation. It was as if until now he had been living in a room whose walls were pictured with flowers and mountains and waterfalls and blue sky, and as if those walls had suddenly vanished, and he could see all about him the real blue heavens, and the real woods and rivers.
The sunny, flower-filled little park of the watering-place was bounded by steep rocks of porphyry. At the foot of them, by the side of a small stream of clear, dark water, was a rich growth of shadowy underwood. A small path led from the mountain, and two children were descending it, hand in hand, talking fast in their light, clear voices.
They were two little girls, about nine and ten years of age. They wore black velvet frocks confined at the waist by colored ribbons—one red, the other ivory-white. Each one had trim, smoothly drawn stockings of the same color as her sash, and fine, low shoes. They were bare-headed, and both had thick golden hair that fell down over the black velvet in heavy, glossy curls.
The musicians, as if aware of their presence, now played a charming dance-tune, and the two little girls, with both hands clasped together, began playfully keeping time with their slender limbs—One, two, three—one, two, three—or the "three-step," as children say. And what Johannes experienced when he saw and heard that, I am not going even to try to describe to you, for the reason that he has never been able himself to do it.
Only know that it was something very delightful and very mysterious, for it made him think of Windekind's fairyland. Why, was more than he could understand.