"I would rather talk to you about it when it's settled one way or the other," he replied. And she was perforce satisfied.
Red-tiled roofs appeared above the bushes, and the mirror-like surface of a lake made a shining line against the horizon.
"Is that where we're going?" asked Lilly.
"It may be," he answered.
"Oh, don't be so mysterious," she scolded him in fun. "I've been very good in not asking questions. But now I really must insist on your telling me what your programme is."
"Yes, when we've got there," he laughed. "I know you, and don't want to make you jealous before the right moment."
Could it be that there was another woman in the case?
Another woman? She did not betray her emotion, but as they walked on she felt quite faint--partly from hunger and partly from mental distress. The lake now lay before them in its early summer beauty, with its greenish-grey girdle of reeds and rushes, and lights and shadows flitting across it.
A little distance from the bank, on a shrubby slope, was the inn, with "Logierhotel" printed on its signboard. It was one of those orange-brick monstrosities built in the barbarous palatial-barn style. But round it three or four ancient lime-trees spread their wide shady branches, and they seated themselves on a white bench beneath them, their mood harmonising with the scene.
To their left the lake stretched away into the hazy distance; on their right, beyond the reeds and sedges of the shore, was a tiny village with moss-green thatched roofs, and a stumpy, storm-beaten spire half hidden among reeds and bushes. And close to them, not a hundred steps from where they sat in the shade of the limes, there rose the wooded slopes and mighty tree-tops of an ancestral park, from the interior of which they caught the gleam of pillars, bridges, and white, vine-clad balustrades. Very likely that was the forbidden garden, outside the gates of which they were to stand to-day. How charming! how mysterious!