These trees that surrounded us were no tame trees of a pleasaunce: they were the outposts of the immortal forest, a thing as living and mysterious as the sea. Their twilight was but the fringe of a robe, extending for hundreds and hundreds of square leagues.
I am a lover of the forest. The forest, and the sea, and the blue sky of God are all that are left to remind us of the youth of the world and the poetry of it, and the old German forests retain most of that lost charm.
They are haunted. The forests of the volcanic Eiffel, the Hartz, the Taunus, still hold the ghost of Pan. I have been afraid in them.
By the lake fringed with ferns, Eloise fell into another sentimental and despairing fit. We were sitting on the lake edge, and I was playing with the recovered drumsticks.
"Ay di mi!" wept Eloise. "When you are gone! I mean when I am gone—when we are departed——"
"Courage!" said I.
"It is the going away," sniffed Eloise, carefully arranging her little skirt around her.
"I know," I said, rattling the sticks; "but it will be soon over."
Unhappy child! I believe she had fallen really in love with me, unconscious of the fact that if I cared for any woman in the world it was for the lovely Countess Feliciani, her mother, and that I had no eyes at all for a thing of my own age in frilled pantalettes, no matter how pretty she might be.