“I shall never forgive myself.”
“You may easily,” she returned.
They walked on in silence for a time over the thick, springy, plush-like turf. The girl seemed preoccupied, and her companion had too much tact to force her to talk. Presently she asked, “Have you had good sport to-day?”
“A big bag of small game which my man has taken to the tent. I have been obliged to shoot alone, as a brother officer who was to have joined me cannot get leave just yet.”
They were passing now through a little wood, their talk languishing strangely; it was, in fact, awkward and disjointed, the girl was distraite, and a strange spell seemed to be on the man.
As they emerged from the wood a glorious landscape lay before them. A great valley, broken up into a thousand tints of light and shade by the setting sun which played among rock and thicket, here and there catching a bend of the glinting stream which wound its way through it. Beyond rose a purple backing of millions of pines, and above and beyond them again the snow-capped mountains in all their stern grandeur.
The girl stopped for a moment. “How lovely!” She spoke without the least suspicion of gush; it was a genuine expression of delight, perhaps curbed by the presence of her companion.
“Yes,” he agreed, “the valley looks beautiful to-day, but, to my thinking, it looks grandest under a stormy sky.”
She was looking towards a spot where, high up on the pine-clad hill a great splash of crimson fire sparkled and glinted, glowing with a brilliancy which tinged the woods around it with its own blood-red colour.
“The Schloss Rozsnyo stands well,” he observed.