Fortunately for Florian, too, Philippina proved to be one of those gay and easy-going young ladies with whom the want of a common tongue wherein to express one’s thoughts forms a very slight barrier to the course of conversation. Already at her châlet he had guessed as much; and now on the hill-top, they walked along side by side, chatting and laughing as they went, with expressive eyes, and making themselves mutually understood as much by nods and becks and wreathèd smiles—so Florian poetically phrased it in his silent soul—as by any articulate form of the German language. Before they had reached the Schloss they stood already on excellent terms with one another, and Florian even consoled himself for the enforced loss of Linnet’s society with the reflection that Philippina was, after all, in many ways “a great deal more practical.” But Linnet, walking behind, was in the seventh heavens. She had found her Engländer once more, and that alone would have been enough for her. But that wasn’t all; this second chance meeting, perfectly natural as it was—for Andreas had but followed the stream of tourists southward—impressed her simple mind with the general idea that the world, after all, wasn’t as big as she had supposed it, and that she’d be liable now to meet the _gnädige Herr_ wherever she went, quite casually and accidentally. Not, indeed, that she troubled her head much just then about the future in any way: with Will by her side, she lived wholly in the present. She didn’t even ask him why he had gone away from Innsbruck without coming to say goodbye to her in person; she didn’t utter a single word of reproach or complaint; she accepted all that; she took it all for granted. Will never could marry her; she didn’t expect him to marry her: a gentleman like him couldn’t marry a peasant-girl; a Catholic like herself couldn’t marry a heretic who scarcely bowed the knee to Our Blessed Lady. But she loved him for all that, and she was happy if he would but let her walk beside him. And in this she was purely and simply womanly. True love doesn’t ask any end beyond itself: it is amply satisfied with being loved and loving.