It, too, was a forbidden garden. Forbidden gardens abounded everywhere, it seemed!
"I think we had better give it up," she said softly; "it only makes our hearts ache."
So hand-in-hand they wandered back along the path they had come, close to the fence, and talked persistently of other things. And yet their eyes still lingered longingly in the neighbourhood of the park, and the aspiration they both felt, but did not express for fear of hinting reproaches, gilded everything with a fairy-tale glamour.
Evening came. Violet mists hung over the meadows, and the copper-coloured trunks of the pines glowed like torches. The deeper the setting sun sank into the reeds and rushes, the more the lake lost its cool, blue, silvery sheen, and took on a network of ruddy gold. It looked now as if it bore on its face the sparkling fulfilment of all earthly promises.
Neither of them could tolerate being on shore any longer.
A boat lay at anchor by the hotel's bathing pavilion, where in the cool of the evening happy bathers were splashing, and they hired it for a mere song. Konrad took the oars and Lilly seated herself at the stern. All kinds of water-flowers rose with a swish lightly to the surface as the boat cut through a carpet of sedges. Mingled with the young green of the sprouting reeds were the brown battered remnants of last year's growth; stately bulrushes bordered the banks, and the water flag planted her golden tents between them. Like huge dense walls of purple, the park's wealth of timber rose high against the sky.
When Lilly pointed this out, Konrad shook his head and said: "It's no good thinking any more about it." But, nevertheless, he kept casting glances in that direction.
Lilly had scarcely ever been in a boat, and soon gave up steering as a bad job. She spread her shawl at the bottom of the boat and made herself a comfortable soft nest, into which she retired.
Crouched at Konrad's feet, she lay there with her back against the seat in the stern. And thus, her eyes dreamily fixed on blue space, she began to build castles in the air about her future, devising plans by which, with a bound, she was to swing herself back into the midst of respectability.