They passed into the hall—that stately old Rittersaal, adorned with marble carvings of the same infantile type—and looked sheer down from the windows a thousand feet on to the valley below, with the falls of the Adige behind, and a sea of tumultuous porphyritic mountains surging and rolling in the farther background. ’Twas a beautiful view in itself, rendered more beautiful still by its picturesque setting of semi-circular arches, divided and supported by slender shafts of polished alabaster. To an untutored girl of Linnet’s native artistic temperament, it was delightful to pass through those lordly halls and into that exquisite chapel with its quaint old frescoes, in company with somebody who could explain their whole meaning to her simple intelligence so well as Will Deverill. Though she felt her own ignorance—felt it acutely, sensitively—she felt at the same time how fast she could learn from such a teacher; and as she dropped on her knees before the twelfth-century Madonna in the spangled shrine of that antiquated chantry, it was not for herself alone that she murmured below her breath, in very tremulous tones, an Ave Maria. Will and Florian talked, too, of the Schloss and its history. Linnet listened with all her ears, though she hardly understood half the English words they used to describe it—how it commanded the whole vast plain of Meran and Botzen, the widest and most populous in the Eastern Alps, one basking garden of vines and Indian corn and fruit-trees, thickly dotted with hamlets, churches, and castles. “You can see why the counts who lived here spread their power and their name by slow degrees over the whole of this country,” Will said, as they gazed down on it. And then he went on to talk of how the Counts of Tyrol gradually absorbed Meran and Botzen, and in course of time, by their possession of the Brenner route, the great mediæval highway from Italy to Germany, acquired the over-lordship of the whole wide tract which is now called after them. Oh, what grand words he used! Linnet listened, and wondered at them. She caught, from time to time, the name of Margaret Maultasch—that Meg of the Pocket-Mouth who made over her dominions to the house of Austria—and learned from stray hints how the Counts of the new line moved their capital northward from Meran to Innsbruck. It was marvellous how Herr Will, who was a stranger from England, should know so much more about her people’s history than she herself did! But there! what did she say? Herr Will knew everything.