"I suppose you have been uttering some stupidity again, Stella," she observes, coldly; "you are incorrigible!"
"Poor mamma, she really is to be pitied," Stella sighs, her sense of humour asserting itself in spite of her; "she has no luck with her children. Her clever daughter commits stupidities, and her silly daughter utters them. Which is the worse?"
CHAPTER VIII.
[A LOVE-AFFAIR.]
It rains the entire ensuing night, and far into the forenoon of the next day. The hollows worn in the stone pavement of the terrace are filled with water, and form little brown ponds. The buff-coloured castle has become orange-coloured, and looks quite worn with weeping. The lawns reek with moisture, and the Malmaison roses are pale and draggled. Drowned butterflies float on the surface of the pools, and fantastic wreaths of mist curl about the foot of the mountains on the farther side of the Save. No sun is to be seen amid the gray-brown rack of clouds.
At last the rain falls more slowly; the chirp of a bird makes itself heard now and then; a white watery spot in the gray skies shows where the sun is hiding; slowly it draws aside the veil from its beaming face, and between the torn and flying masses of cloud the heavens laugh out once more, blue and brilliant.
Tempted forth by the delightful change in the weather, Katrine, Stasy, and Stella venture out to take their daily bath in the Neuring. In its normal condition the Neuring is a clear, sparkling stream, flowing freely over its pebbly bed in constant angry attack upon diverse fragments of rock which look in magnificent disdain upon its impotent assaults. A bath in the current between the largest of these fragments of rock, where for the convenience of the bathers a stout pole has been fixed, is a great favourite among the delights of Erlach Court.
One shore of the stream slopes, flower-strewn and verdant, nearly to the water's edge, and here stands a roughly-constructed bath-house, from which wooden steps lead down into the water.
Stella is sitting, in a very faded bathing-suit of black serge trimmed with white braid, on the lowest of these steps, gazing sadly into the stream.
"I certainly did behave with unpardonable stupidity yesterday," she says, twisting her golden hair into a thick knot and fastening it up at the back of her head with a rather dilapidated tortoise-shell comb.