She smiled a little.  ’We expected Temple’s arrival sooner than yours, Harry!’

‘Do you take to his Lucy?’

‘Yes, thoroughly.’

The perfect ring of Janet was there.

Mention of Riversley made her conversation lively, and she gave me moderately good news of my father, quaint, out of Julia Bulsted’s latest letter to her.

‘Then how long,’ I asked astonished, ’how long have you been staying with the princess?’

She answered, colouring, ‘So long, that I can speak fairish German.’

‘And read it easily?’

‘I have actually taken to reading, Harry.’

Her courage must have quailed, and she must have been looking for me on that morning of miserable aspect when I beheld the last of England through wailful showers, like the scene of a burial.  I did not speak of it, fearing to hurt her pride, but said, ‘Have you been here—­months?’

‘Yes, some months,’ she replied.

‘Many?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and dropped her eyelids, and then, with a quick look at me, ’Wait for Temple, Harry.  He is a day behind his time.  We can’t account for it.’

I suggested, half in play, that perhaps he had decided, for the sake of a sea voyage, to come by our old route to Germany on board the barque Priscilla, with Captain Welsh.

A faint shudder passed over her.  She shut her eyes and shook her head.

Our interview satisfied my heart’s hunger no further.  The Verona’s erratic voyage had cut me off from letters.

Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew.  She was always Janet to me; but why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the princess?  Was she neither maid nor widow—­a wife flown from a brutal husband? or separated, and forcibly free?  Under such conditions Ottilia would not have commanded my return but what was I to imagine?  A boiling couple of hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I meditated, I could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned to wait on me, and hear whether the English lady was a Fraulein.  The Margravine and Prince Ernest were absent.  Hermann worked in his museum, displaying his treasures to Colonel Heddon.  I sat with the ladies in the airy look-out tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense speculations, which devoured themselves and changed from fire to smoke, while I recounted the adventures of our ship’s voyage, and they behaved as if there were nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the secret I thirsted for.  I should not certainly have thirsted much if Janet had met me as far half-way as a delicate woman may advance.  The mystery lay in her evident affection, her apparent freedom and unfathomable reserve, and her desire that I should see Temple before she threw off her feminine armour, to which, judging by the indications, Ottilia seemed to me to accede.

My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding dilatorily over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages sent to meet him.  He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of minutes with his trumpery ‘How d’ ye do’s,’ and his glances and excuses, and then I had him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not Temple’s fault if he did not begin straightforwardly.