"Prithee, no! To tell the honest truth, I am surfeited with compliments, and 'twould give me a great pleasure if during these few minutes we are together you would style me neither nymph, divinity, nor angel, but would treat me as just a woman. The fashion, indeed, is not worth copying, the more especially when, to quote your own phrase, one copies it without discretion." She laughed pleasantly as she spake, and the words conveyed not so much a rebuke as the amiable raillery of an intimate. "'Tis true," I replied, "I do envy these townsmen. I envy them their grace of bearing and the nimbleness of their wits, which ever reminds me of the sparkle in a bottle of Rhenish wine." She shook her head, and made room for me by her side. "The bottle has stood open for me these two months since, and I begin to find the wine is very flat." She dropped her voice at the end of the sentence, and leaned wearily back upon the cushions. "You see, Mr. Buckler," she explained, "I live amongst the hills," and there was a certain wistfulness in her tone as of one home-sick. "Then there is a second bond between us, for I live amongst the hills as well." "It is that," said she, "which makes us friends," and just for a second she laid a hand upon my sleeve. It seemed to me that no man ever heard sweeter words or more sweetly spoken from the lips of woman. "But since you are here," I questioned eagerly, "you will stay--you will stay for a little?" "I know not," she replied, smiling at my urgency; and then with a certain sadness, "some day I shall go back, I hope, but when, I know not. It might be in a week, it might be in a year, it might be never." Of a sudden she gave a low cry of pain. "I daren't go home," she cried, "I daren't until--until----" "Until you have forgotten." The words were on the tip of my tongue, but I caught them back in time, and for a while we sat silent. The Countess appeared to grow all unconscious of my presence, and gazed steadily down the quiet street as though it stretched beyond and beyond in an avenue of leagues, and she could see waving at the end of it the cedars and pine-trees of her Tyrol. Nor was I in any hurry to arouse her. A noisy rattle of voices streamed out on a flood of yellow light from the further windows on my left, and here she and I were alone in the starlit dusk of a summer night. Her very silence was sweet to me with the subtlest of flatteries. For I looked upon it as the recognition of a tie of sympathy which raised me from the general throng of her courtiers into the narrow circle of her friends. So I sat and watched her. The pure profile of her face was outlined against the night, the perfume of her hair stole into my nostrils, and every now and then her warm breath played upon my cheek. A fold of her train had fallen across my ankle, and the soft touch of the velvet thrilled me like a caress; I dared not move a muscle for fear lest I should displace it.