"As you please, Countess Erika," he replied, unable to restrain a smile at this novel way of treating a rejected suitor.
When he lifted her from her horse shortly afterwards, he just touched her gray riding-glove with his lips; she looked kindly at him, and as he gazed after her from the hall as she ascended the staircase she turned her head to give him a friendly little nod.
His heart grew lighter; he would not take too seriously her rejection of his suit; it was not final. "After all," he thought, "in spite of her precocious intelligence she is but a charming, innocent child; and that is what makes her so bewitching."
The sunlight gleamed on the gilded tops of the iron railings of the front gardens in Bellevue Street, upon the leaves of the trees, and upon the long line of red-painted watering-carts stretching away in perspective like the beads of a huge rosary. The heat was already rather oppressive in Berlin. But Goswyn was robust, and sensitive neither to heat nor to cold. His ride with Erika was but the beginning of his daily exercise, and he trotted off to finish it.
In the Charlottenburg Avenue he encountered the same cavalcade he had seen before in the Thiergarten in the midst of his declaration to Erika. Thanks to her agitation, the girl had recognized none of the party, but he had bowed to his sister-in-law and her esquires. Now she beckoned to him from a distance, and called, "Goswyn!"
She was considerably taller and more slender than Erika, but she looked well in the saddle. Her gray-green eyes sparkled with malicious mockery from beneath the brim of her tall hat. "Goswyn," she cried, speaking with her accustomed rapidity in her high piercing voice and with her strange lisp, "you were just now made the subject of a wager."
"But, Thea," Prince Nimbsch interrupted his cousin, "we none of us agreed to wager with you."
"What was it about?" asked Goswyn, with a most uncomfortable presentiment that some annoyance threatened him.
The three men with Dorothea looked at one another; Dorothea giggled. At last Prince Nimbsch said, "My cousin wished to wager that the Countess Erika would be wooed and won this spring."
"Oh, no," Dorothea interrupted him; "that was not it at all. I wagered that you had been refused by Erika this morning in the Thiergarten, Gos. Helmy would not believe me; but I have sharp eyes."