We had now reached the castle. "Give me the guitar," she said, "but keep the book: I know it by heart. Have you had breakfast? No? Poor, poor George! it is lucky that no dragon met us; you would have been hardly able to stand upon your feet." A side-door, that I had not previously noticed, led to that part of the ground-floor inhabited by the father and daughter. Constance called an old female servant, and directed her to prepare me some breakfast, and then she left me, after giving me her hand, with that melancholy transient smile which I had already noted on her beautiful lips. CHAPTER VII. The breakfast which the ugly, taciturn old woman--whom Constance called "Pahlen"--set before me after about half an hour, might well have been ready in less time, for it consisted only of black bread, butter, cheese, and a flask of cognac. The cognac was excellent; but the remainder of the repast far from luxurious, for the bread was sour and mouldy in spots, the butter rancid, and the cheese hard as a stone; but what was that to a youth of nineteen, who had eaten nothing for twelve hours, and whose silly heart, moreover, was palpitating with its first passion! So it seemed to me that I had never had a more sumptuous repast; and I thanked the old woman for her trouble with the utmost politeness. "Pahlen" did not seem to know what to make of me. She looked askance at me two or three times, with a sort of surly curiosity; and to the questions that I put to her, replied with an unintelligible grumbling, out of which I could make nothing. The room in which I now found myself--it was the same into which Herr von Zehren had conducted me on our first arrival--might, in comparison with the deserted apartments of the upper story, be called habitable, though the carpet under the table was ragged, several of the carved oaken chairs were no longer firm upon their legs, and a great antique buffet in one corner had decidedly seen better days. The windows opened upon a court, into which, my breakfast once over, I cast a look. This court was very spacious, the barns and stables that enclosed it of the very largest dimensions, such as are only found on the most considerable estates. So much the more striking was the silence that prevailed in it. In the centre of the space was a dove-cot built of stone, but no wings fluttered about it, unless perhaps those of a passing swallow. There was a duck-pond without ducks, a dunghill upon which no fowls were scratching--one peacock sat upon the broken paling--everything seemed dead or departed. Here was no hurrying to and fro of busy men, no lowing of cattle or neighing of horses--all was vacant and silent; only from time to time the peacock on the paling uttered his dissonant cry, and the sparrows twittered in the twigs of an old linden.