The schloss was so vast, so solidly constructed, that no sound came to us from the other guests.
After breakfast, when we were running down a corridor making for the garden, and led by Eloise, a gentleman stopped us, and spoke a few words of greeting, and passed on.
"That was the King," said Eloise. "He is leaving to-morrow—he and Graf von Bismarck. We, too, are leaving the day after."
"You, too?" I cried, my childish heart recalling the lovely Countess Feliciani, who had been clean forgotten for twelve hours or more.
"Yes," said Eloise. "And there's mamma. Come along. See, she is with those ladies by the fountain."
We had broken into the garden, a wonderful and beautiful garden, with shaven lawns and clipped yew-trees, terraces, dim vistas cypress-roofed, and, far away down one of these alleys a sight to fascinate the heart of any child, the figure of a great stone man running. He was dressed in green lichen, lent him by the years; he held a spear in his hand, and he seemed in the act of hurling it at the game he was pursuing there beyond the cypress-trees at the edge of the singing pines.
For the garden became the forest without wall or barrier, except the shadow cast by the trees; and you could walk from the sunlight and the sound of the fountains into the dryad-haunted twilight and the old quaint world of the woods.
The Countess kissed Eloise; then she bent to kiss me, and I—I turned my face away—a crimson face—and felt like a fool.
Someone laughed—a gentleman who was standing by. The Countess laughed; and then, to my extreme relief, someone came to my rescue.
It was little Carl. He had run into the house for his drum, and now he was coming along the path solemnly beating it, with Eloise for a faithful camp follower. I joined her; and away down the garden we went, hand in hand, marching in time to the rattle of the little drum.