The much talk of him on the promenade overnight fetched his name to her thoughts; he scarcely touched a mind that her father filled when she was once again breathing early morning air among the stems of climbing pines, broken alleys of the low-sweeping spruce branches and the bare straight shafts carrying their heads high in the march upward.  Her old father was arch-priest of such forest land, always recoverable to her there.  The suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and her old father and she were aware of one another without conversing in speech.  He pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger for the solitudes of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling.  He would not let a sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea forward disturb the scene.  A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out, with a strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy and ferns; he saw what his girl saw.  Power of heart was her conjuring magician.

She climbed to the rock-slabs above.  This was too easily done.  The poor bit of effort excited her frame to desire a spice of danger, her walk was towering in the physical contempt of a mountain girl for petty lowland obstructions.  And it was just then, by the chance of things—­by the direction of events, as Dame Gossip believes it to be—­while colour, expression, and her proud stature marked her from her sex, that a gentleman, who was no other than Lord Fleetwood, passed Carinthia, coming out of the deeper pine forest.

Some distance on, round a bend of the path, she was tempted to adventure by a projected forked head of a sturdy blunted and twisted little rock-fostered forest tree pushing horizontally for growth about thirty feet above the lower ground.  She looked on it, and took a step down to the stem soon after.

Fleetwood had turned and followed, merely for the final curious peep at an unexpected vision; he had noticed the singular shoot of thick timber from the rock, and the form of the goose-neck it rose to, the sprout of branches off the bill in the shape of a crest.  And now a shameful spasm of terror seized him at sight of a girl doing what he would have dreaded to attempt.  She footed coolly, well-balanced, upright.  She seated herself.

And there let her be.  She was a German girl, apparently.  She had an air of breeding, something more than breeding.  German families of the nobles give out, here and there, as the Great War showed examples of, intrepid young women, who have the sharp lines of character to render them independent of the graces.  But, if a young woman out alone in the woods was hardly to be counted among the well-born, she held rank above them.  Her face and bearing might really be taken to symbolize the forest life.  She was as individual a representative as the Tragic and Comic masks, and should be got to stand between them for sign of the naturally straight-growing untrained, a noble daughter of the woods.