"It is not the going away," said Eloise; "it is the parting from friends that makes going away so sad." She was a terribly sentimental child by fits and starts, falling into sentiment and falling out of it again with the facility of a newly dislocated limb from its socket. Next moment I was chasing her down the corridor, both of us making the corridor echoes ring with our laughter. At the end, just by the glass door leading to the garden, down she plumped in a corner and put her little pinafore over her head. I believe she wanted, or expected, me to pull the pinafore away and kiss her, but I didn't. I just pulled her up by the arm, and we both bundled out into the garden, and in a moment she had forgotten kissing amidst the flowers, plucking the asters and the Michaelmas daisies, and chasing the butterflies that were still plentiful in the late summer of that year. We passed the fountains, and stopped to admire the running man. His face, worn away by time and weather, still had a ferocious expression. One wondered what he was chasing with the spear that seemed for ever on the point of leaving his hand. "Toto," said Eloise, "yesterday when we took the drum with us, we forgot to bring little Carl's sticks: we left them by the pond." "So we did," said I. "Let's go and fetch them," said Eloise. "Come on," I replied. We took the forest path leading to the lake. It was like plunging into a well of twilight. These trees that surrounded us were no tame trees of a pleasaunce: they were the outposts of the immortal forest, a thing as living and mysterious as the sea. Their twilight was but the fringe of a robe, extending for hundreds and hundreds of square leagues. I am a lover of the forest. The forest, and the sea, and the blue sky of God are all that are left to remind us of the youth of the world and the poetry of it, and the old German forests retain most of that lost charm. They are haunted. The forests of the volcanic Eiffel, the Hartz, the Taunus, still hold the ghost of Pan. I have been afraid in them. By the lake fringed with ferns, Eloise fell into another sentimental and despairing fit. We were sitting on the lake edge, and I was playing with the recovered drumsticks. "Ay di mi!" wept Eloise. "When you are gone! I mean when I am gone--when we are departed----" "Courage!" said I. "It is the going away," sniffed Eloise, carefully arranging her little skirt around her. "I know," I said, rattling the sticks; "but it will be soon over." Unhappy child! I believe she had fallen really in love with me, unconscious of the fact that if I cared for any woman in the world it was for the lovely Countess Feliciani, her mother, and that I had no eyes at all for a thing of my own age in frilled pantalettes, no matter how pretty she might be.