Arches, overgrown with yet
unblooming roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty. Stillness
brooded over it all, and they met no one. They scarcely broke the
silence themselves. The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and
Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness
seemed to add a spell of enchantment. What could one say, to a stranger,
of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.
"But, oh!" she murmured once, standing still, with indrawn breath, "if
it were mine!--if it were mine!" And she said the thing forgetting that
her guide was a living creature and stood near.
Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the memories of a
dream. The lack of speech between herself and the man who led her, his
often averted face, her own sense of the desertedness of each beauteous
spot she passed through, the mossy paths which gave back no sound of
footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all, unreality. When
at last they passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and
crossing a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps
which led them to a point through which they saw the house through a
break in the trees, this last was the final touch of all.
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