share of the general excitement.  Temple and mademoiselle did most of the conversation, which related to glimpses of scenery, pine, oak, beech-wood, and lake-water, until we gained the plateau where the tower stood, when the giant groom trotted to the front, and worked a clear way for us through a mass of travelling sight-seers, and she leaned to me, talking quite inaudibly amid the laughter and chatting.  A band of wind instruments burst out.  ‘This is glorious!’ I conceived Temple to cry like an open-mouthed mute.  I found it inspiriting.

The rush of pride and pleasure produced by the music was irresistible.  We marched past the tower, all of us, I am sure, with splendid feelings.  A stone’s throw beyond it was the lofty tent; over it drooped a flag, and flags were on poles round a wide ring of rope guarded by foresters and gendarmes, mounted and afoot.  The band, dressed in green, with black plumes to their hats, played in the middle of the ring.  Outside were carriages, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback, full of animation; rustics, foresters, town and village people, men, women, and children, pressed against the ropes.  It was a day of rays of sunshine, now from off one edge, now from another of large slow clouds, so that at times we and the tower were in a blaze; next the lake-palace was illuminated, or the long grey lake and the woods of pine and of bare brown twigs making bays in it.

Several hands beckoned on our coming in sight of the carriages.  ’There he is, then!’ I thought; and it was like swallowing my heart in one solid lump.  Mademoiselle had free space to trot ahead of us.  We saw a tall-sitting lady, attired in sables, raise a finger to her, and nip her chin.  Away the little lady flew to a second carriage, and on again, as one may when alive with an inquiry.  I observed to Temple, ’I wonder whether she says in her German, “It is my question”; do you remember?’ There was no weight whatever in what I said or thought.

She rode back, exclaiming, ’Nowhere.  He is nowhere, and nobody knows.  He will arrive.  But he is not yet.  Now,’ she bent coaxingly down to me, ’can you not a few words of German?  Only a smallest sum!  It is the Markgrafin, my good aunt, would speak wid you, and she can no English-only she is eager to behold you, and come!  You will know, for my sake, some scrap of German—­ja?  You will—­nicht wahr?  Or French?  Make your glom-pudding of it, will you?’

I made a shocking plum-pudding of it.  Temple was no happier.

The margravine, a fine vigorous lady with a lively mouth and livelier eyes of a restless grey that rarely dwelt on you when she spoke, and constantly started off on a new idea, did me the honour to examine me, much as if I had offered myself for service in her corps of grenadiers, and might do in time, but was decreed to be temporarily wanting in manly proportions.

She smiled a form of excuse of my bungling half-English horrid French, talked over me and at me, forgot me, and recollected me, all within a minute, and fished poor Temple for intelligible replies to incomprehensible language in the same manner, then threw her head back to gather the pair of us in her sight, then eyed me alone.