"The tiniest, compactest kingdom," she went on in a musing tone, "sequestered in a nook of the world." She seated herself on a chair which stood at the edge of the Piazza. "Indeed, I shall return there, and that, I fancy, soon." "Countess!" replied Culverton. "That were too heartless. 'Twould decimate London, let me perish! For never a gallant but would drink himself to death. Oh, fie!" Marston joined eagerly in the other's protestations. For my part, however, I remained silent, well content with what she had said. For I recollected the evening when I first had talk with her, and the construction which I had placed upon her words; how she would never return to Lukstein until she was eased of the pain which her husband's disaster had caused her. The notion that her memories had lost their sting thrilled me to the heart, and woke my vanity to conjecture of a cause. "Then," said the Countess, "would my friends be proved heartless. For it is their turn to visit me, and I would not be baulked of requiting them for their kindness to me here. 'Tis not so tedious a journey after all." "I can warrant the truth of that," said Culverton. "For I have been as far as Innspruck myself." "Indeed?" said the Countess. She looked hard at him for a second, and then laughed to herself. "When was that?" she asked. "Some six years ago. I was on the grand tour with a tutor--a most obnoxious person, who was ever poring over statues and cold marble figures, but as for a fine woman, rabbit me if he ever knew one when he saw her. He dragged me with him from Italy to Innspruck to view some figures in the Cathedral." "Then you must needs have passed beneath Lukstein," said the Countess, "for it hangs just above the high-road from Italy." Culverton would not admit the statement. Some instinct, some angelic warning, he declared, would surely have bidden him stop and climb to the Castle as to a holy shrine. The Countess laughingly assured him that nevertheless he had passed her home, and with a fond minuteness she described to him its aspect and position. Then the strangest thing occurred. She leaned forward in her chair, and with the tip of the stick she carried, drew a line on the gravel at the edge of the pavement. "That represents the road from Meran," she explained. "The stone yonder is the Lukstein rock, on which the Castle stands." She briefly described the character of the village, and marked out the windings of the road from the gates at the back of the Castle down the hillside, until she had well-nigh completed a diagram in all essentials similar to that which Julian had sketched for me in my Horace. "From the village," she said, "the road runs in a zigzag to join the highway." She traced two long, distinct lines, but stopped of a sudden at the apex of the second angle, where the coppice runs to a point, with her face puckered up in a great perplexity. Culverton asked her what troubled her.