"Levez-vous! Levez-vous! Levez-vous! Ta-ra-ra! Pom, pom! Hi! God's teeth, my knife! What does it here?"

Joubert could sound the rÉveille with his mouth almost as well as a trumpeter, and he was grand at imitating the big drum.

Up I shot in bed, rubbing my eyes.

"Your what?"

"My knife. Ha! I've caught you. Cutting your sticks and carving your name with my couteau de chasse! You have been to my bedroom. Don't answer me! You have been to my bedroom, and taken it from the pocket of my coat. A pretty thing!"

Joubert's temper all yesterday had been savage; his infernal amours were not prospering, it seems. In fact, as I afterwards learned from his own lips, a scullion, resenting his addresses, had called him an old French dog without teeth.

"It was sticking in my pillow when I came to bed!" cried I, indignant at the accusation.

"Your pillow, when you came to bed!" Joubert seized me, ran me across the room by my shoulders to a large mirror, pointed to the reflection of my shrinking form, and yelled:

"Do you see that?"

"Mais, oui."

"Then you see a liar."

"But, Joubert——"

"Not a word!"

"But I want to tell you——"

"Not a word!"

That was always Joubert's way—"Not a word."

"But I want to tell you!"

"Not a word!" And he jabbed the sponge in my mouth, for I was standing by this time in the bath.

I never could tell whether Joubert was joking or in earnest, so I said no more; but it was none the less irritating to be called a liar by Joubert, whose lies about battle, murder, and sudden death were palpable, and sometimes cynically self-confessed.

Little Carl did not appear at breakfast, and Eloise was very despondent, not about Carl, but about going away. She would not touch jam, and she made use sometimes, in a secretive manner, of a handkerchief, small enough, goodness knows, yet chiefly composed of lace.

"It is not the going away," said Eloise; "it is the parting from friends that makes going away so sad."

She was a terribly sentimental child by fits and starts, falling into sentiment and falling out of it again with the facility of a newly dislocated limb from its socket.

Next moment I was chasing her down the corridor, both of us making the corridor echoes ring with our laughter. At the end, just by the glass door leading to the garden, down she plumped in a corner and put her little pinafore over her head.

I believe she wanted, or expected, me to pull the pinafore away and kiss her, but I didn't. I just pulled her up by the arm, and we both bundled out into the garden, and in a moment she had forgotten kissing amidst the flowers, plucking the asters and the Michaelmas daisies, and chasing the butterflies that were still plentiful in the late summer of that year.

We passed the fountains, and stopped to admire the running man. His face, worn away by time and weather, still had a ferocious expression. One wondered what he was chasing with the spear that seemed for ever on the point of leaving his hand.

"Toto," said Eloise, "yesterday when we took the drum with us, we forgot to bring little Carl's sticks: we left them by the pond."

"So we did," said I.

"Let's go and fetch them," said Eloise.

"Come on," I replied.

We took the forest path leading to the lake.

It was like plunging into a well of twilight.

These trees that surrounded us were no tame trees of a pleasaunce: they were the outposts of the immortal forest, a thing as living and mysterious as the sea. Their twilight was but the fringe of a robe, extending for hundreds and hundreds of square leagues.

I am a lover of the forest. The forest, and the sea, and the blue sky of God are all that are left to remind us of the youth of the world and the poetry of it, and the old German forests retain most of that lost charm.

They are haunted. The forests of the volcanic Eiffel, the Hartz, the Taunus, still hold the ghost of Pan. I have been afraid in them.

By the lake fringed with ferns, Eloise fell into another sentimental and despairing fit. We were sitting on the lake edge, and I was playing with the recovered drumsticks.

"Ay di mi!" wept Eloise. "When you are gone! I mean when I am gone—when we are departed——"

"Courage!" said I.

"It is the going away," sniffed Eloise, carefully arranging her little skirt around her.

"I know," I said, rattling the sticks; "but it will be soon over."

Unhappy child! I believe she had fallen really in love with me, unconscious of the fact that if I cared for any woman in the world it was for the lovely Countess Feliciani, her mother, and that I had no eyes at all for a thing of my own age in frilled pantalettes, no matter how pretty she might be.

Before Eloise could reply to my unintentionally brutal remark, a figure came out from amidst the trees and towards us. It was one of the jÄgers. A man past middle age, bent and warped like a tree that has stood the tempest for years.

This man's name was Vogel, and good cause I have to remember that name.

"Aha!" said he. "The children! FrÄulein Eloise, Gretel is seeking for you in the house."

We rose.

"Come," said Eloise. And I was turning to go with her, but Vogel, who held a stick in one hand and a small penknife in the other, said to me as he whittled at the stick:

"See you, have you ever made a whistle?"

"No," I replied, interested, despite the man's German accent and his face, which was not attractive, for his cheeks were sucked in as though he were perpetually drawing at a pipe, and his nose, too small for his face, was hooked. I have never seen a nose so exactly like the beak of a screech-owl.

Vogel, without a word, sat down and began cutting away at the whistle.

"Are you not coming?" said little Eloise.

"In a minute," I replied, looking over Vogel's shoulder at his handiwork.

"Then stay," she pouted. And away she ran.

I looked on at Vogel and his work, one foot preparing to go, the other foot holding me.

"There is an old woman who lives in the wood," said Vogel, as he cut at the stick, "and she makes whistles."

"Does she?" I replied.

"She does," said Vogel. "She makes them of silver, and of glass, and of gold, and when you blow on them they go——"

A strange warbling sound filled the wood. It was Vogel showing how the whistles of the old woman sounded when you blew into them.

He had put a bird-call—the thing foresters use for snaring birds—between his lips. He removed it again with a laugh, and went on with his work.

"She lives in a house made of gingerbread," went on the fowler. "And know you what the panes of her windows are made of?"

"No."

"Sugar, clear as your eye. And guess you what the door is made of?"

"No."

"Marzipan. Ah! that is a good house to live in," said Vogel. And I mentally concurred.

"She keeps white mice, and rabbits with green eyes."

"Green eyes?"

"Yes; and she gave little Carl a rabbit for himself last time I took him to see her. There." He handed the whistle, which was finished, up to me over his shoulder, and I blew on it and found it good.

"Would you like to have a rabbit like that?" asked Vogel, filling his pipe and lighting it.

"I would."

"Well, you can have one. I will get one for you to-morrow, or to-day, if you like to come with me to see the old woman who makes the whistles. Will you come?"

"What time?" said I, hesitating.

"Now," said Vogel.

My answer was cut short by a sound from behind—the clinking of a bucket—and Joubert and a stout servant-maid appeared from the path leading to the lake. They were coming to gather water-plants for some household decoration.

Joubert was gallantly carrying the bucket.

Vogel sprang to his feet.

"I must go," said he. "It was my joke. I am the old woman who makes the whistles."

Off he went.

I have often thought since that much weariness, much sorrow to me, and much plotting and planning to the Great Writer of love-stories. Who lives above, might have been saved if I had gone that day with Vogel to see "the old woman who makes the whistles."

"What was Skull-face saying to you?" asked Joubert.

"He made me this," said I, showing him the pithed stick.

The Felicianis departed at three o'clock. Eloise, with her cheeks flushed, was laughing with excitement: she seemed quite to have forgotten her grief. Four horses drew their carriage. They were bound for Homburg, where they would pass the night before going on to Frankfort.

I remember, as the carriage drove off. Countess Feliciani looked back and smiled at us—at my father, myself, Von Lichtenberg, Major von der Goltz, and General Hahn, all grouped on the steps. God! had she known the happenings to follow, how that smile would have withered on her lips!

Carl was still invisible, and the great schloss, now that Eloise was gone, seemed strangely empty to me. It is wonderful how much space a child can fill with its presence. Eloise's happy little form had diffused itself, spreading happiness and innocence far and wide, and dispelling I know not what evil things. If a rose can fill a room with its perfume, who knows how far may reach the perfume of an innocent and beautiful soul!

At six o'clock I was in the library; a box of tin soldiers, which my father had bought for me at Carlsruhe, stood open on the table, and the armies were opposed.

I was not too old to play with soldiers like these, for there were shoals of them: officers, and drummers, and gunners, cannon, flags—everything. As a matter of fact, Major von der Goltz had been playing with me, too, and I'll swear he took just as much interest in them as I.

He had gone now, and I was tired of the soldiers. I turned my attention to the books. I was walking along by the shelves, examining the backs of the volumes and trying to imagine what the German titles could mean, when suddenly, from amidst the books, I heard a child's voice.

The child seemed singing and talking to itself, and the sound seemed to come from the volumes on the shelves. It was strange to hear it coming from amidst the books like that, as though some volume of fairy tales had suddenly become vocal, and HÄnsel, playing by the witch-woman's door, had found a voice.

Then I noticed that the books before me were not real books, but imitation.

In the centre of one of these imitation book-racks there was a little brass knob. I pressed it, and the wall gave, disclosing a passage. The book-backs were but the covering of a narrow door.

This passage, suddenly disclosed, fascinated me.

It was dimly lit from above, and ended in a door of muffed glass. About half way down on the floor stood a toy horse—a dappled-grey horse with a broom-like tail and a well-worn saddle—evidently left there by some child, and forgotten.

I could hear the child's voice now distinctly. He or she was singing, singing in a monotonous fashion, just as a child sings when quite alone.

I came down the passage to the door. The muffing of the door had been scratched. There was a spyhole, evidently made by a child, for it was just on a level with my own eye, and there was a word scratched on the paint of the muffing which, though I had to read it backwards, I made out to be—

CARL.

I peeped through the hole. It disclosed a room, evidently a nursery, plainly but pleasantly furnished. On the window-seat, looking out and drumming an accompaniment on the glass to the tune he was singing, knelt Carl.

I looked for the handle of the door, found it, turned it, opened the door, without knocking, and entered the room.

The child at the window turned, and, when he saw me, flung up his arms with a gesture of terror and glanced round wildly, as if for somewhere to hide. It cut me to the heart; it frightened me, too—this terror of the child for me. I remembered Eloise's words: "Little Carl is a girl."

"Gretel! Gretel! Gretel!" cried the child as I ran forward, took him in my arms, and kissed him on the forehead.

Whether he had expected me to hit him or not I don't know; but at this treatment he ceased his cries, and, pushing me away from him, looked at me dubiously.

"I won't hurt you, little Carl!" And at the words a whole ocean of tenderness welled up in my heart for the trembling and lonely little figure in the soldier's dress, this Pomeranian grenadier, timorous as a rabbit. I must, in this heart of mine, have some good; for, boy as I was, with all the fighting instincts of the Mahons in my blood, I felt no boyish ridicule for this creature that a blow would make cry, but all the tenderness of a nurse, or a person who holds a live and trembling bird in his hand.

"I won't hurt you. I didn't mean to knock you in the pond."

"But you did," said Carl, still dubious.

"I know, and I'm sorry. See here, Carl, I'll give you my dog."

"Your big dog?" asked Carl, for he had seen Marengo bounding about the lawn.

"Yes," said I, knowing full well that the promise was about equivalent to the promise of the moon.

The little hand fell into mine.

"Gretel," said Carl, now in a confidential tone, "told me you would kill me if I played with you, or went near you, or if I looked at you."

"Oh, how wicked!" I cried. "I kill you!" And I clasped the little form more tightly.

"I know," said Carl.

He was a personage of few words, and those two words told me quite plainly that he believed me and had confidence in me.

"It's not you," he said, after a pause. "She said you didn't want to do it, but you'd have to do it; for you were a bad man once, and you'd have to do it over again," said Carl. "What you'd done before, for someone had said so. I don't know who they were." He had got the tale so mixed up that I could scarcely follow his meaning. "When will you give me the dog?" he finished, irrelevantly enough.

"I'll give you him—I'll give you him to-morrow," I said, "if father will let me. But he's sure to, if I ask him."

Scarcely had I finished speaking than the door opened and Gretel appeared.

She stood for a moment when she saw us together, as though the sight had turned her into stone.

Then she came towards us.

"How did you get here?" said she to me.

"Through that door," I answered her.

She took me by the hand and led me away. As she did so, something closed round my neck, and something touched me on the cheek.

It was Carl, who had put his arms round my neck and kissed me.

Ah, little Carl, little Carl! Little we knew how next we should meet, or the manner of that meeting!