slowly climbing the steep mountain-path.
The wood was quite deserted – every man, woman, and child being busy below with the entertainment of the learned men.
It was many a day since Gretchen had found herself so entirely alone; and somehow she was not in a humour to relish her solitude just now. She was on bad terms with herself, – she who hitherto had always lived on such a very satisfactory footing with her conscience, her mind, and her will. Now her conscience was uneasy, her mind was perplexed, and her will – well, as for her will, she no longer felt sure of it.
The whole of the past week had been a week of fatigue, if of amusement. Wherever Gretchen went, Baron Tolnay went; and where Baron Tolnay was, there also was Princess Tryphosa – unless, indeed, when Gretchen's steps had been turned to the mountains, for to the mountains Princess Tryphosa did not follow. Perhaps the dissatisfaction of Gretchen's mind arose from the fact that her first few skilfully set traps had failed to catch the simple Bohemian's secret; and that therefore Gaura Dracului, and with Gaura Dracului the brigands' treasure, and with the brigands' treasure her own fortune, still remained undiscovered. Or perhaps it was that she still felt uncertain of her victory over Tryphosa.
There were moments when she thought the victory secure, and there- were others when she doubted it. The doubt had been sufficient to rouse her ambition with the stimulus of rivalry, – to prick the side of her intent, which else might have grown faint: it had added excitement to the meetings of this past week; it had urged her to out the line again more than once, and to play the bait on which was to be hooked her fortune. But in the midst of the game a certain uneasy dread had seized her more than once, and to-day it was on her again. Or was this dissatisfaction perhaps a little unconscious pity for Tryphosa, who, as Gretchen had long since discovered, loved István Tolnay? But since Gretchen did not believe in love, what right had she to feel pity? No; more likely it was a sense of justice. If István Tolnay had been a prize equally coveted by them both, it would have been all fair play to contend for him on a fair field; but to take from Tryphosa that which she was not sure of wanting herself, this was what Gretchen could not quite reconcile with her notions of justice and logic.
She might have become yet more deeply involved in this train of logical deduction, had not the overhanging branch of a mountain-ash tree rudely caught her by the hair, just as her thoughts had reached this point.
It was getting late, she discovered to her surprise, and the sun was sinking brilliantly and fast. What had become of Kurt? She ought to have met him long ago. Looking round her, she wondered to find herself so high up; for the last twenty minutes she had steadily, though unconsciously, been mounting, and now she stood on a rocky path, bordered with bilberry-bushes, while the gloomy valley lay at her feet.
That uncourteous ash-tree had been the last tree of this tract of forest. Here the mountain was wellnigh bare; low brushwood grew between the rocks, tufts of delicate grass covered the ground, and wild-flowers shook unprotected in the breeze. Along the shoulder of the hill the stony path continued.
