Now she was enacting a _role_ that enchanted her. She was the benevolent chatelaine, doing her best to rescue an inferior, and her breast swelled with a sense of her exalted virtue. They had emerged from the dusky shadows of the ancient avenue of limes, a ray of light from the afterglow in the west pierced the boughs and suffused his thin freckled face with a deep flush. He appeared to be absolutely crushed and penitent, and Lilly was already regretting that she had been too hard on him. "I quite see," he began after a pause, and his voice trembled with suppressed emotion, "that I ought to clear myself from such a grave imputation. I am asked to set up a defence, and I can; but in so doing I am forced to reveal a secret ... and I am not sure whether it would be fair to your gracious baroness to enlighten you on the awful failing that has shipwrecked my whole life." "Tell me at once what it is," urged Lilly, burning with curiosity. "Well, if you must know, it is this. From childhood I have been pursued by a ghastly fate, which overcomes me at moments when I am most powerless, and fastens on me the responsibility for crimes of which I am utterly innocent. Be prepared, therefore, to hear something terrible. I am--I am a somnambulist." As he glanced sideways at Lilly, there was such a droll, wicked twinkle playing under the light lashes that she burst into a fit of light laughter. He joined in with his dear old noiseless giggle that shook him like an earthquake. So they stood still and both laughed till they cried; and Lilly forgot all about her exalted duties as chatelaine and her mission of salvation. Then, instinctively, their footsteps turned together into the most deserted and overgrown part of the park, where its bounds were lost in a dense thicket of birches. It grew darker at every step. The foxy little dog had abandoned himself to his fate and trotted obediently after his master. "The truth is, my dear friend," said he, when they had recovered partially from their levity--"why should I make any false pretences?--I am a poor fish here floundering out of water. Can you imagine what it is to have to lead a vegetable existence in the society of plebeians, and from morning to night practise the arts of virtue and seriousness? I can assure you it's often as bitter as a dose of aloes. Tommy helps me over the worst hours, but even Tommy is sometimes a disappointment.... May I take this opportunity, by-the-by, of asking you a very interesting question, my gracious baroness?" Delighted at his returning gravity Lilly assented. "Can you move your ears up and down?" She was again seized with laughter as with an illness. She leaned against the trunk of a tree, and struggled in vain with her merriment, while he continued in a tone of profound despondency.