She said with adorable malice: "I thought you were going to rob me first."
"I am," he said, smiling.
"Then I shall make the crime a very difficult one for you.... So that our—parting—may be deferred."
The train had already come to a standstill beside a little red-tiled station. Woods surrounded it; nothing was visible except the lamps on a light station-wagon drawn up to the right of the track.
The guard unlocked and opened their compartment. A young man—a mere boy—came up smilingly and lifted his cap:
"Mademoiselle Girard? Monsieur Guild? I come from Quellenheim with a carriage. I am Fritz Bergner."
He took their luggage and they followed to the covered station-wagon. When they were seated the boy stepped into the front seat, turned his horses, and they trotted away into the darkness of a forest through which ran the widely winding road.
Fresh and aromatic with autumn perfume the unbroken woods stretched away on either hand beneath the splendour of the stars. Under little stone bridges streams darkled, hurrying to the valley; a lake glimmered through the trees all lustrous in the starlight.
Something—perhaps the beauty of the night, possibly the imminence of his departure, kept them silent during the drive, until, at last, two unlighted gate-posts loomed up to the right and the horses swung through a pair of iron gates and up a driveway full of early fallen leaves.
A single light sparkled far at the end of the vista.