CHAPTER II.
THE ARMS OF EXPECTATION.
On the day after their father's departure, I saw neither Ernestine nor Gabrielle. They were no doubt discomposed by his sudden absence; but they had been so used to see him go and come again, and generally little the worse save a slash or two, that in the evening I expected to meet them in the garden adjoining the royal residence of Nyekiöbing, the spacious donjon tower of which, with its heavy battlements and grated casements, overlooked it. I was not disappointed. From the window of my apartment I saw them walking there, and hurried to meet them.
It was a beautiful autumnal evening; the low flat shore of the island was bordered by a stripe of golden sand, encircled by the glittering waves of a dark blue sea, on which the sunburnt woods of the past summer cast a long and lingering shadow. Behind the yellow beach and its shady woods of brown, the sun like a golden targe began to sink, and as it sank, a million of sparkles seemed to shoot from its descending disc; down, slowly down it went; the wavering rays shot further upward; they played upon the clouds above, and lingered long there after the sun itself had disappeared; then a deeper blue spread over the waters of the Guldborg Sound—those waters among which (as the old queen once told us) Grön Jette—or the Green Giant—shot a beautiful mermaid, whom he had pursued round Falster for seven years and a day; the woods appeared in darker outline against the lurid sky, and their crisped leaves rustled in the rising wind, as the evening deepened.
Gabrielle was looking sadly towards the sea, as if she was pondering on the path their father was pursuing; but Ernestine had seated herself, and was embroidering on the cover of a large Roman missal, a coat of arms with gold and variously coloured thread. Poor Ernestine's ideas of Catholicism were not very well defined, and consisted more in forms than belief; for nearly all that her Spanish mother had taught her in infancy, the mother of Gabrielle—a French or Belgian Protestant—had left no means untried to obliterate; but Ernestine loved to do all that she thought would please her mother who was in heaven; she loved, as she said, to consider herself "the peculiar care of the mother of God;" she read more prayers than usual in the month of May, and decorated her little altar with the lilies of Mary; but her opinions were very vague and undecided. She and Gabrielle said their prayers every night and morning together on their knees, and before a crucifix; yet Gabrielle did not consider herself a Catholic. Ernestine seemed the most devout in the queen's train when in the Lutheran church of Nyekiöbing, yet she would have repelled with scorn the imputation of being a Protestant. They had both been taken frequently to task by Father d'Eydel, but his asceticism and his harangues rather terrified them; and, being almost entirely occupied by military duty and dreams of ambition, the count had permitted them both to please themselves. Ernestine had an intense love for Gabrielle, and her regard for Gabrielle's mother had only been second to that which she bore her own.
There was but one heart—one soul seemed to animate these two winning creatures.
"Herr Kombeek," said Gabrielle, hastening to me; "you saw our father before he left this, and can tell us his last messages?"
"The most tender love to you, and that you were both to keep light hearts till his return. But you must not call me that name now, Gabrielle. Mine is the same as your father's—the same as yours, as I have just discovered—Philip Rollo."
"Oh, that is charming!" exclaimed both the girls looking up, one with her blue eyes, and the other with her black, beaming with pleasure.
"Your father——"