The soldier gave the profoundly thoughtful frown of those incapable of thought. “I don’t know,” he said. “Soldiers must have rules. Everything must be done by rules, so that it will be done just as it used to be. We’ve had the same rules—oh, hundreds of years. Nothing must be changed. What’s new is bad, what’s old is good.”

Grafton trudged on into the wilderness. The road gradually swept into another road. He saw that it was a circle, a girdle,[31] about a lake which was perhaps four miles long and two miles wide, blue as the sky and mirroring it to its smallest flake of snowy cloud. Opposite him, across the width of the lake, towered and spread The Castle, with turrets and battlements, a vast, irregular mantle of ivy draping part of its old gray front. He could see terraces and lawns of brilliant green, the gaudiness of flower-beds and flowering bushes, red and blue and purple and yellow. “Where Her Serene Highness lives,” he thought.

[31]

He decided to walk as far as The Castle; next day he would drive and perhaps pay his respects to Baron Zeppstein. He was impressed by the loneliness of the park, apparently an untouched wilderness except the road. The birds were singing. Now and then there would be a crash and[32] he would see a deer making off, or a whir and a scurrying flapping, and he would get a glimpse of some wild bird in panic-stricken flight. As he came nearer to The Castle the signs of habitation were numerous, but still not a human being. At last he was close to the walls, looking up at them.

[32]

He could see nothing but the perfect order of the shrubbery to indicate that any one had been there recently. The huge gates—solid doors rather than gates—were closed. The sun was shining, the waters of the lake glistened, the foliage was fresh and vivid, the soft, strong air blew in a gentle breeze. But there was a profound hush, as if the grim old fortress-palace, and all within and around it, had long been locked in a magic sleep.

A sense of uncanniness was creeping[33] over him in spite of his incredulous American mind. He was startled by a trumpet blast which seemed to come from the depth of the woods to the left. Standing in the middle of the road, he turned. He had just time to jump aside.

[33]

Out of the woods, by a cross-road he had not noted, swept a gorgeous cavalcade. As he looked he felt more strongly than ever like a time-wanderer who had been, in a 

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