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.