"Oh, see how beautiful!" she said with a blissful sigh.
A demon took possession of Lilly. Touching her horse with her crop she went off in a mad gallop that was contrary to all the rules and regulations of horseback riding.
The next instant, however, Von Prell was at her side gripping her reins and pulling up both horses.
They looked at each other with flashing eyes.
Lilly felt she had to throw herself over toward him just to be nearer to him.
"Say, Lilly, what do you mean by that?" he hissed.
"Say, Walter, what do you mean by that?" she retorted.
They turned the horses' heads and rode back home slowly, in silence, without looking at each other.
The threshing machine had been singing its autumn song for many a day. Its monotonous whirr could be heard far beyond the castle court. It carried no message of golden blessings or glowing crystallised sunlight. From morning till late at night it moaned and howled like an æolian harp in stormbeaten branches; and sometimes soft, long-drawn cries burst from its entrails, as if the sheaves it was torturing and tearing had been endowed with speech.
So much dreamy bliss dwelt again in Lilly's soul that she got nothing but allurement and yearning from this music, which entirely obsessed her in her morning slumber and kept her lying in bed a long time in a drowsy half-sleep the better to listen to its even, unvarying singsong.
A comrade, a playmate, that was what she had needed all along, some one in whose company to make merry and complain, some one who would confess all his follies, his most secret sins, and then receive laughing absolution. For whatever his crime, he was not the guilty one; his youth was the sinner, the same sweet, mischievous youth which filled her soul with melancholy and her body with shuddering, which dominated them both like a beneficent yet tormenting divinity, who favoured the one and ruined the other.
He had to be saved--saved from his own frivolity, from that fatal condition of his soul which threatened to entangle and choke him in a net of vulgar escapades. Rumours of the low life he was leading kept cropping up not to be silenced, and she needed but to step inside the servants' hall for a stream of gossip to come gushing over her like a jet of dirty water.