Carinthia murmured in German:  ‘Poor soul!’ Which one was she pitying?  The widow, she said, in the tone implying, naturally.

Her brother assured her the widow was used to it, for this was her second widowhood.

‘She marries again!’ exclaimed the girl.

‘You don’t like that idea?’ said he.

Carinthia betrayed a delicate shudder.

Her brother laughed to himself at her expressive present tense.  ’And marries again!’ he said.  ‘There will certainly be a third.’

‘Husband?’ said she, as at the incredible.

‘Husband, let’s hope,’ he answered.

She dropped from her contemplation of the lady, and her look at her brother signified:  It will not be you!

Chillon was engaged in spying for a place where he could spread out the contents of his bag.  Sharp hunger beset them both at the mention of eating.  A bank of sloping green shaded by a chestnut proposed the seat, and here he relieved the bag of a bottle of wine, slices of, meat, bread, hard eggs, and lettuce, a chipped cup to fling away after drinking the wine, and a supply of small butler-cakes known to be favourites with Carinthia.  She reversed the order of the feast by commencing upon one of the cakes, to do honour to Mariandl’s thoughtfulness.  As at their breakfast, they shared the last morsel.

’But we would have made it enough for our dear old dog Pluto as well, if he had lived,’ said Carinthia, sighing with her thankfulness and compassionate regrets, a mixture often inspiring a tender babbling melancholy.  ‘Dogs’ eyes have such a sick look of love.  He might have lived longer, though he was very old, only he could not survive the loss of father.  I know the finding of the body broke his heart.  He sprang forward, he stopped and threw up his head.  It was human language to hear him, Chillon.  He lay in the yard, trying to lift his eyes when I came to him, they were so heavy; and he had not strength to move his poor old tail more than once.  He died with his head on my lap.  He seemed to beg me, and I took him, and he breathed twice, and that was his end.  Pluto! old dog!  Well, for you or for me, brother, we could not have a better wish.  As for me, death! . . .  When we know we are to die!  Only let my darling live! that is my prayer, and that we two may not be separated till I am taken to their grave.  Father bought ground for four—­his wife and himself and his two children.  It does not oblige us to be buried there, but could we have any other desire?’

She stretched her hand to her brother.  He kissed it spiritedly.

’Look ahead, my dear girl.  Help me to finish this wine.  There ’s nothing like good hard walking to give common wine of the country a flavour—­and out of broken crockery.’

‘I think it so good,’ Carinthia replied, after drinking from the cup.  ’In England they, do not grow wine.  Are the people there kind?’

‘They’re civilized people, of course.’