CHAPTER XV. NOT LONG A-DOING. It was night when Usk arrived at Lauterbach. At the little station, far down in the valley below, Queen Ernestine’s solemn Syrian major-domo and several of the Schwarzwald-Molzau servants had met him with horses and pack-mules, and they had ridden up and up all through the hours of the spring evening. When they reached the tiny table-land on which the Bergschloss stood, it was too dark to distinguish anything but towering peaks on every hand shutting out the stars, with a gleam of whiteness at one side, cast by the waterfall which filled the air with such a tumult of sound that Usk wondered how the dwellers on the plateau ever heard each other speak. He was to learn later that those who were accustomed to the noise did not even hear it, and that they could distinguish other sounds as though it had not been. Even now Helene, lying awake in one of the turret-rooms of the Schloss, the twinkling lights of which showed its position against the dark mountains, heard the sound of the horses’ feet as they passed, and said to herself, “He is come, then, at last!” But although Usk, as he rode under the walls of the castle, wondered for a moment which was Helene’s room, he thought no more of her that night after reaching the smaller house, called Luisenruh, after its builder, the mother of the present Grand-Duke, where his aunt was staying. Queen Ernestine had much to ask him about his parents and his work in London, and he had to tell her the various incidents of his journey, and as if by a tacit understanding they held aloof from the delicate matter which had brought him to Lauterbach. In the morning, however, he found that they were to join the Grand-Duchess and her daughter at the Schloss for the late breakfast; and he walked with the Queen through the gardens, which adjoined each other so nearly that few people could have told where the grounds of the cottage ended and those of the Schloss began, and learned from a servant who was sent to meet them that the meal was served in the Chinese pavilion. There were several of these summer-houses dotted about in the gardens--a Greek temple, a hermitage, a Persian mosque, an Arcadian shepherd’s hut, all absurdly incongruous in their architecture as in their names, but affording pleasant retreats in hot or wet weather, and fine views of the mountains and the waterfall at all times. In the Chinese pavilion, which had a range of pointed roofs one above another, with little bells hung at every possible extremity, the visitors found the Grand-Duchess, whose nervousness was concealed under a restless activity which would have been called bustling in a lady of lower rank. Helene, very thin and bright-eyed, with a red spot in either cheek, was propped up with pillows on a couch which commanded the finest of the views.