After the noonday breakfast the sun shone, the mists lifted from the water, the clouds drifted from the lower mountains, only leaving the snow-capped head of the Glöckner enveloped in them.
'I am going to ride; will you come?' said Wanda von Szalras to him. He assented with ardour, and a hunter, Siegfried, the mount which was always given to him, was led round under the great terrace, in company with her Arab riding-horse Ali. They rode far through the forests and out on the one level road there was, which swept round the south side of the lake; a road, turf-bordered, overhung with huge trees, closed in with a dewy veil of greenery, across which ever and anon some flash of falling water or some shimmer of glacier or of snow crest shone through the dense leafage. They rode too fast for conversation, both the horses racing like greyhounds; but as they returned, towards the close of the afternoon, they slackened their pace in pity to the steaming heaving flanks beneath their saddles, and then they could hear each other's voices.
'What a lovely life it is here!' he said, with a sigh. 'The world will seem very vulgar and noisy to me after it.'
'You would soon tire, and wish for the world,' she answered him.
'No,' he said quickly; 'I have been two months on the Holy Isle, and I have not known weariness for a moment.'
'That is because it is still summer. If you were here in the winter you would bemoan your imprisonment, like my aunt Ottilie. Even the post sometimes fails us.'
'I should not lament the post,' he replied, thinking of the letter he had cast into the lake. 'My old life seems to me insanity, fever, disease, beside these past two months I have spent with the monks.'
'You can take the vows,' she suggested with a smile. He smiled too.
'Nay: I should not dare to so insult our mother Church. One must not empty ashes into a reliquary.'
'Your life is not ashes yet.'