"There's the place!"
"And do you really think that at last we have ..." She dared not suggest it.
"If we like, we can in this boat traverse the whole unexplored region by water."
In her childlike jubilation she jumped up with an exclamation, and simply fell on his neck as if it was a natural thing to do, and they had never made any platonic vows.
Slowly the boat drifted on with the current--between meadows lined with weeping willows, where the evening mist hung like white scarves. Peasants' cottages stood near, with fishing-nets spread out over the fences. Then, at a bend in the stream, a dark gateway of foliage opened like a huge vault in front of them.
"Oh, goodness!" cried Lilly.
"Hush!" he whispered, in pretended awe. "Now we must be as quiet as mice, or we shall get turned out for trespassing, after all."
And the dip of his oars became so stealthy that it might have been taken for the splash of a leaping fish.
Thus they rowed under the triumphal arch of leaves which thickly interlaced overhead. It was pitch dark close around them, though here and there from the right bank came an occasional gleam of summer twilight. Lamplights, too, twinkled in the distance, and they could catch the hum of voices, the clink of glasses, and now and then a stray chord struck on the piano. The foliage parted, and an unimpeded view of the castle lay before them. It was a wide, two-storeyed, box-like structure, its ponderous simplicity dating from a period when the grandees of Brandenburg still possessed little sense of the artistic. But on the stone steps gleamed the marble nymphs that had greeted them in the afternoon, and beyond their white bodies one saw on the terrace itself a long table, round which was gathered, in the flickering lamplight, a chattering, laughing party, passing gaily with song and wine the intoxicating summer evening.
"And he might be sitting there too," thought Lilly, "if I were not hanging like a millstone about his neck," and she felt almost as if she must apologise to him.