"Oh! so the garden isn't forbidden after all?" cried Lilly, holding out her arms ecstatically towards the green mysterious barriers. "We may just walk straight in."
Konrad's face became thoughtful. "It's not so simple as that," he said, "for how should I introduce you? You are not my wife.... Only between ourselves you are my sister, and we are too young to trump up any other plausible relationship."
A sudden bitterness welled up within her. Once more she felt despised and rejected, ostracised from honourable society.
"You should have left me at home," she broke out. "I am only an encumbrance to you."
"Ah, Lilly," he said, "what do I really care about marble busts? I would rather stand behind the fence with you than have the run of the whole park without you."
She caressed his hand, as it hung by his side, mollified and grateful. And then at last the carp came.
Two hours later they were pacing along a seemingly endless wall, half as high again as a man, with no break in it to peep through. "Not till they came to the corner of the park where the wall ended did they find a less impenetrable, high, moss-grown fence, which ran along to the right. Now through the gaps they could get a view of the interior. Venerable plane-branches formed arches over shady nooks, with groups of oaks and limes between. The open grassy lawns were banked with rhododendrons, the blossoms of which looked like violet eyes. On a knoll in the background, a little round temple with Tuscan columns and a shining green roof looked solemnly out of its dark surrounding cypresses.
"She must be in there," Konrad said. But the little temple was empty, so they prosecuted their search further afield. Not a single opening in the foliage escaped their vigilance. Here and there statues gleamed, a Ceres, a Satyr playing on his flute, and in a cypress thicket they caught a glimpse of a shrine of the Virgin, but nowhere did they see a sign of the strange, beautiful woman's head they were looking for.
They went on. A stream ran out from the park across the road, spanned by a rough plank such as is to be met with in any country lane. But a hundred paces away, inside the park, was another snow-white glistening bridge, throwing its graceful arch boldly over the water.