That avowal of Linnet’s that she didn’t want Andreas Hausberger to know of Will’s presence in the town put Will’s relations towards her during the next few weeks on a different, and to some extent compromising, footing. It introduced into their meetings a certain shadowy element of clandestine love-making which was in many ways distasteful to Will’s frank and manly nature, though it was at the same time, as Florian felt, a hundred times more “dangerous” for him than any open acquaintance. For Andreas, after all, was Linnet’s ostensible guardian and nearest male protector. To meet Linnet on the hills, without his knowledge or consent, was to place oneself in the position of an unrecognised lover. Will knew it was a mistake. And yet?—?he did it. We, who have made no mistakes of any sort in all our lives, but have steadily followed the beaten track all through, with sheep-like persistence, can afford to disapprove of him.

So, day after day, during the next few weeks, Will went up on the hills to walk and talk with Linnet. Rue Palmer was delighted. She thought, poor soul, her scheme was succeeding admirably. Will was out every morning on the mountains alone, working hard at his magnum opus, which was to astonish the world, and with which she had inspired him. It was glorious, glorious! And, indeed, in spite of the time wasted in talking with Linnet, though the best spent time, as everybody knows, is the time we waste, Will did really succeed in writing and composing at odd moments and in the night watches no small part of his graceful and beautiful little operetta, “The Chamois Hunter’s Daughter.” But alas for poor Rue, it was not she who inspired it.

On these morning expeditions up the surrounding hills to some appointed trysting-place, Florian sometimes accompanied him, and sometimes not. But, in any case, he abstained from mentioning their object to Rue; as he put it himself, never should it be said that Florian Wood could split upon two ill-advised but confiding young people. It suited Florian’s book now, indeed, that Will’s attention should be distracted from Rue to Linnet. He wanted to make the running for himself with the American heiress, and he was by no means sorry that so dangerous and important a rival as the author of “Voices from the Hills” should be otherwise occupied. So he kept his own counsel about Will and Linnet; he had abdicated by this time his self-appointed function of moral censor; and seeing they would go to the devil in any case, he was inclined to let them go their own headlong way, into the jaws of matrimony, without preliminary haggling. He that will to Cupar, maun to Cupar. Deverill would marry his cow-girl in the end?—?of that Florian felt certain; and when a man’s quite determined to make a fool of himself, you know, why, you only earn his dislike, instead of his esteem, by endeavouring to win him back again to the ways of wisdom.

And Will? Well, Will himself had as yet no very fixed ideas of his own as to whither he was tending. Being only a poet, he was content to drift with the wind and tide, and watch on what shoals or shores they might finally cast him. Most probably, if things had been allowed to go their own way, he would sooner or later have justified Florian’s pessimistic prophecies by marrying Linnet. He would have gone on and on, falling more and more deeply in love with the pretty peasant every day, and letting her fall every day more and more deeply in love with him, till at last conventional differences sank to nothing in his eyes, and he remembered only that heart answereth to heart, be it poet’s or alp-girl’s. At present, however, he troubled himself little with any of these things. He was satisfied for the moment, Florian said, to bask in the sunshine of that basilisk’s smile, without care for the morrow. Sooner or later, he felt sure, in so small a town, either Florian or he must run up unawares against Andreas Hausberger. Whenever that happened, no doubt, there must be some sort of change or new departure. Meanwhile, he religiously avoided the Promenade, where he was likeliest to come suddenly on the wise impresario. So he stuck to the hills, with or without Linnet.

The very next morning, indeed, after this their chance meeting, he went up the Küchelberg once more, impressed with an ardent desire to aid and abet Linnet’s laudable wish for self-education. He brought a book up with him to read to the two girls under the bright blue sky, as they sat on the hillside. He chose a pleasant spot, in the full eye of the autumn sun, on a rounded boss of rock, whose crumbling clefts were still starred with wild pinks and rich yellow tormentils. Florian had contributed to the feast of reason and the flow of soul a kilogram of grapes?—?they cost but threepence-halfpenny a pound in the vintage season?—?unknown luxuries till then to Philippina and Linnet. Philippina found the grapes delicious, but the book rather dry; its style was stilted, and it appeared to narrate the story of a certain Doctor Faust, his transactions with a gentleman of most doubtful shape (who caused Philippina to look round in some fear), and his wicked designs against the moral happiness of a young girl called Gretchen. Philippina yawned; it was a tedious performance. Florian, having reduced his share of the grapes to their skins alone, yawned in concert with the lady, and began to play with his eyeglass. As his German didn’t suffice to understand the lines, even when aided by Will’s dramatic delivery and clear enunciation, he found the play slow, and the reader a nuisance. So he was very well pleased when Philippina suggested, at a break in the first act, they should go off for a walk by themselves alone, and continue their course of oral instruction in the German language. Florian liked Philippina; there was no silly nonsense about her. After all, in a woman, if all you want is a walk on the Küchelberg, the total absence of silly nonsense, you must at once admit, is a great recommendation.

But Linnet sat on. She sat on, and listened. She drank it in, open-eyed, and with parted lips?—?every line and every word of it. Dear Herr Will read so well, and made her feel and understand every point so dramatically; and the book?—?the book itself was so profoundly interesting. Never in her life before had Linnet heard anything the least bit like it. It was grand, it was beautiful! She didn’t know till then the world contained such books; her reading had been confined to her alphabet and grammar at the parish folk-school, supplemented by the good little tracts on purgatory and the holy saints, distributed by the Herr Vicar and the sisters at the nunnery. Theological literature was the sole form yet known to her. This weird tale about Gretchen and the transformed philosopher opened out to her new vistas of a world of possibilities. Long after, when she sang in great opera-houses, as Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust,” she remembered with a thrill how she had first heard that tale, in Goethe’s deathless words, from Will Deverill’s lips, on the green slopes of the Küchelberg.

She sat there for an hour or two, never heeding the time, but listening, all entranced, to that beautiful story. Now and again Will broke off, and held her hand for a moment, and gazed deep into her eyes, and said some sweet words of his own to her. He was a poet, Herr Will, in his own tongue and land; she knew now what that meant?—?he could make up such lovely things as he read from the book to her. “Tell me some of your own, Herr Will. Tell me some of your own verses,” she said, sighing, at last. “I should love to hear them.”

But Will shook his head. “The English is too hard. You wouldn’t understand them, Linnet,” he answered.

“Let me try,” Linnet pleaded, with such a winning look that Will couldn’t resist her. And to humour her whim, he repeated the simplest of the laughing little love-songs from his book of “Voices.”

The ring of it was pretty?—?very sweet and musical. Linnet half understood?—?no more; for the words were too hard for her. But it spurred her on to further effort. “You must lend me some books like that in English,” she said, simply. “I want to be wise, like you and Herr Florian.”

So Will brought her next day from the book-shop in the town the dainty little “Poetry Book of Modern Poets,” in the Tauchnitz edition. He wrote her name in it too; and Linnet took it home, and hid it deep in her box in a white silk handkerchief, and read bits of it by night, very stealthily in her own room, spelling out what it meant with Andreas Hausberger’s dictionary. Long after, she had that precious volume bound in white Florentine vellum, with a crimson fleur-de-lys on the cover, at a house just opposite the Duomo at Florence. But at present she read it in its paper covers. She read other books, too?—?German books which Will chose for her; not instructive books which were over her head, but poetry and romance and imaginative literature, such as her ardent Tyrolese nature could easily assimilate. Day after day, Will read her aloud something fresh?—?Undine, the Maid of Orleans, Uhland’s Ballads, Paul Heyse’s short stories?—?but of all the things he read to her, the one she liked best was a German translation of an English play?—?a beautiful play by another English poet, whose name was also Will, ............