She looked ahead as she said,
“Now I want to gallop as swiftly as I can and forget everything except that this is the most beautiful place in the world!”
She touched her horse with her whip and he, sprang forward as if as eager as she was to gallop over the grassy steppe.
As the horses thundered over the soft ground, Ilona thought it was the most marvellous sensation she had ever known.
Riding homewards she could not help looking at the peasants they passed working in the fields, busy in the small villages, or in the woods which surrounded the Palace.
Was it her imagination, she asked herself, or did they look sulky and resentful?
Or had she been wrong in remembering a smiling, good tempered people who had been her countrymen in the past?
The wooden houses with their balconies fille
