'Let us read German this _abscheulich_ afternoon,' said the Fräulein. 'Suppose we go on with the "Sorrows of Werther."' 'Werther was a fool,' cried Mary; 'any book but that.' 'Will you choose your own book?' 'Let me read Heine.' Fräulein looked doubtful. There were things in Heine--an all-pervading tone--which rendered him hardly an appropriate poet for 'the young person.' But Fräulein compromised the matter by letting Mary read Atta Troll, the exact bearing of which neither of them understood. 'How beautifully Mr. Hammond read Heine that morning!' said Mary, breaking off suddenly from a perfectly automatic reading. 'You did not hear him, did you? You were not there,' said the Fräulein. 'I was not _there_, but I heard him. I--I was sitting on the bank among the pine trees.' 'Why did you not come and sit with us? It would have been more ladylike than to hide yourself behind the trees.' Mary blushed crimson. 'I had been in the kennels with Maulevrier; I was not fit to be seen,' she said. 'Hardly a ladylike admission,' replied the Fräulein, who felt that with Lady Mary her chief duty was to reprove. CHAPTER XV. 'OF ALL MEN ELSE I HAVE AVOIDED THEE.' It was afternoon. The white hills yonder and all the length of the valley were touched here and there with gleams of wintry sunlight, and Lady Maulevrier was taking her solitary walk on the terrace in front of her house, a stately figure wrapped in a furred mantle, tall, erect, moving with measured pace up and down the smooth gravel path. Now and then at the end of the walk the dowager stopped for a minute or so, and stood as if in deep thought, with her eyes dreamily contemplating the landscape. An intense melancholy shadowed her face, as she thus gazed with brooding eyes on the naked monotony of those wintry hills. So had she looked in many and many a winter, and it seemed to her that her life was of a piece with those bleak hills, where in the dismal winter time nothing living trod. She stood gazing at the sinking sun, a fiery ball shining at the end of a long gallery of crag and rock, like a lamp at the end of a corridor; and as she gazed the red round orb dropped suddenly behind the edge of a crag, as if she had been an enchantress and had dismissed it with a wave of her wand. 'O Lord, how long, how long?' she said. 'How many times have I seen that sun go down from this spot, in winter and summer, in spring and autumn! And now that the one being I loved and cared for is far away, I feel all the weariness and emptiness of my life.' As she turned to resume her walk she heard the muffled sound of wheels in the road below, that road which was completely hidden by foliage in summer, but which was now visible here and there between the leafless trees. A carriage with a pair of horses was coming along the road from Ambleside.