"The Venetian bridges are like that," he said.
"Across such a bridge the gods entered Walhalla," she sighed.
They stood still and conjured up the joy of crossing that bridge. But still they could not get on the track of the marble bust.
Beyond the plank bridge, where the village began, the park receded some way from the lane. A row of Weymouth pines flanked the inner side of the fence. The quaint village street was gay with Sunday festivities. Dancing was going on to the accompaniment of piano and fiddles, and somewhere bowls were rolling merrily; but they passed without taking any notice of these things, for all their interest was still centred on the forbidden garden. Every moment it drew them with more compelling charms. Crumbling gate-posts were half-hidden among the village lime-trees, and the palings were so rotten they hardly held together. At this spot the foliage on the inner side was quite impenetrable to the eye. Trunk was garlanded to trunk by growths of clematis and ivy, and lilac and spiræa bushes were massed underneath. It looked as if the master of the garden had, in addition to a stone wall, drawn a living one around his demesne to hedge in himself and his family in happy seclusion.
For a long time they walked on without being rewarded by another glimpse of the inside of the park. Then unexpectedly they came to an old three-cornered gateway which, with its vases and pillars, its cracked belfry and lacework of latticed railings, was half buried in blossoming acacias.
Here at last they got an uninterrupted view of the inside of the park. A straight avenue of pines led in solemn dignity up to the castle, but even at this favourable standpoint nothing of its architecture was revealed to their gaze. Trees and bushes hid it from view. The only bit of stone-work their eager eyes discerned was a flight of steps on the columns of which marble nymphs raised aloft their snow-white wings.
"Isn't that lovely?" Lilly murmured with a sigh; and thrusting her face through the iron bars, she whimpered and begged playfully to be let in.
"That is exactly how I stood, outside the gate at Ravello," he said. "Now you know what it is like."
As he said this, it struck her that the sensation of being shut out somewhere was familiar to her too. She knew as well as he did what it was like. But where was it that cold iron had pressed her cheeks before?
Ah! now she recollected. Had she not many a time stood without the latticed door which barred the staircase to the private part of Liebert & Dehnicke's warehouse? That pretentious, proud, forbidding laurel-flanked ascent, which her unholy feet might never tread?