And Will? Well, Will had a poet’s nature, and the poet lives in the passing emotion. Only a man of moods can set moods before us. Like Linnet herself, Will thought little of the future when Linnet was beside him. He meant her no harm, as he said truly to Florian; but he meant her no good either: he meant nothing at all but to walk by her side, and hold her hand in his, and feel his heart beat hard, and her finger-touch thrill through him. Walking thus as in a mist, they passed Dorf Tyrol; and the road at once grew wilder and more romantic. It grew also more sequestered, with deeper bends and nooks, as it turned the corners of little ravines and gulleys, where they could look at one another more frankly with the eager eyes of young love; and once, Will raised his hand to Linnet’s nut-brown cheek, and pressed it tenderly. Linnet said nothing, but the hot blood rushed to her face with mingled shame and pleasure; and who was so glad as she that Will Deverill should touch her! The path wound round a deep gorge, overhanging a torrent, with Schloss Tyrol itself frowning beyond on its isolated crag—a picturesque and half-ruinous mediæval fortress, almost isolated on a peninsular mass of crumbling mud-cliff, interspersed with the ice-worn débris of pre-historic glaciers. ’Tis a beautiful spot. Pretty Alpine rills, tearing headlong down the sides, have carved out for themselves steep ravines which all but island the castle; their banks rise up sheer as straight walls of cliff, displaying on their faces the grey mud of the moraine, from which the ice-worn boulders project boldly here and there, or tumble from time to time to encumber the littered beds of the streams that dislodged them. But what struck Florian most of all, as he paused and looked, was the curious effect produced where a single large boulder has resisted the denuding action of the streams and the rainfall, so as to protect the tapering column of hardened mud beneath it. Each big rock thus stood paradoxically perched on the summit of a conical pillar, called locally an earth-pyramid, and forming, Florian thought, the most singular element in this singular landscape. Close to its end the track bends round an elbow to skirt the ravine, and then plunges for a hundred yards or more into a dark and narrow underground passage through the isthmus of moraine stuff, before drawing up at the portcullis of the dismantled fortress. A more romantically mysterious way of approaching a mediæval stronghold Florian could hardly imagine: it reminded him of Ivanhoe or the Castle of Otranto.