“What do you think of my mountains?” she demanded eagerly of Usk, as soon as she had greeted him, and she smiled with pleasure over his answer that they looked jolly. “You can’t know them properly by only seeing them from this distance,” she went on. “I shall show you all my own special views and paths, and all the things I used to discover.” “No mountain-climbing just yet, Lenchen!” said the Grand-Duchess. “You are to walk a little every day as soon as you are rested from the journey, you know, but it must be only about the gardens, where the paths are level.” “Walking where the paths are level! Why, mamma, in a fortnight I shall be bicycling again. We will keep the level paths for that. I want to take Lord Usk up the mountains, and see all my friends.” But in spite of Helene’s eagerness for exertion, it was long before she could attempt the mountains. Naturally enough, when the excitement of returning to her favourite scenes, and of welcoming Usk, had passed, she seemed to lose strength, and to the anxious eye of her mother appeared actually worse than she had been at Nice. Almost in desperation, the Grand-Duchess threw herself upon Usk for help, and adopted him as the natural sharer of her anxieties with a calmness that surprised him. “You must help me to save her,” she said. “Here are the doctor’s directions, and I look to you to carry them out.” Somewhat amused though he was at being turned into a sick-nurse, Usk accepted the position, which he found to be no sinecure, and which made him feel by turns horribly cruel and a good deal of a fool. Helene was to live almost entirely in the open air, it seemed, and to take exercise at stated hours and for a fixed period of time. If she grew tired too soon, it was his duty to pretend not to notice it, and to talk to her as she walked until she forgot it too. Or if, as sometimes happened, she was ready to wander on when the stated time was over, he was obliged to induce her to rest, which could occasionally only be done by pretending that he himself was tired. It struck him once, when he was hurrying after his patient with a rug, because she would not sit down anywhere but on the grass, that his position was a good deal less romantic than might have been expected from his conversation with his mother. Helene talked to him as naturally as if he had been her brother, and he could not flatter himself that her frank pleasure in his society, and her readiness to turn to him for everything she wanted done, sprang from any stronger feeling than pure friendliness. His uncle and the Grand-Duchess must have been mistaken, he decided, and the fact produced in him curiously mixed sensations. On the one hand, when Helene was better, nothing more would be expected of him, and he could go his way in peace; but, on the other, he felt that he had to some extent been fooled when he was induced to screw himself up to the performance of a tremendous exploit which now appeared quite unnecessary.