With a creak, she pushed the iron gate open a little further and stepped into the new garden.

Hidden behind quite high stone walls, she hadn’t realized how spacious it was until she was inside. The trees were very tall as well.

Adele followed a path lined with hemlock and oak trees toward the shaded spot she spotted earlier, when a rustling sound came from beneath the shade and someone walked out.

“Who are you?”

Adele nearly sat down right where she stood. Her legs trembled.

Someone she failed to notice, hidden in the deep shade of the trees, walked forward.

Step by step, the stranger moved toward her, toward the sunlight where Adele stood.

“…I said, who are you.”

He spoke in a voice a little sharper than before and stopped in front of Adele.

He was a very tall man.

Dark hair as deep as the shade, and a suit that looked expensive and refined at a glance. The gold buttons on the suit were engraved with an intricate pattern and lettering. She wasn’t sure, but it looked like some kind of crest.

The blue eyes looking down at her were like a sea of unfathomable depth. A sharp nose, a firm jawline, and a firmly pressed mouth.

Adele stared blankly at the strikingly handsome young man standing before her, looking like he stepped out of a painting.

“I… I am Adelaide Baden.”

“Baden?”

“Yes. I came to Heitzrind manor not long ago.”

Karl looked down at the small golden-haired girl trembling before him.

Ten years old, eleven perhaps?

A girl who didn’t even know this place was off-limits.

She was too young to be a servant, and if she were a servant’s child, she would not have been able to get in here.

“How did you get in?”

“The gate over there was open….”

The fingertip the girl pointed showed the blue gate, standing half open.

He must have unlocked it and not shut it properly.

He let the sharpness that briefly rose in him ease.

Karl had an extreme aversion to being disturbed when he was in his own space or trying to rest.

From the train station to Heitzrind manor, he rode in the car with the driver who came to meet him, but he walked the rest of the way to this blue garden on purpose.

After a semester spent in the noise of unhinged young men his own age, he wanted to rest a while in his sanctuary.

The school in Schultz outwardly maintained the appearance of a refined and composed academy where the sons of the upper-class nobility gathered to study, but the actual behavior of those upper-class sons was every bit as rowdy as street rabble.

“I don’t know how long you’ve been here, but didn’t anyone tell you this is not a place just anyone can enter?”

“I’m sorry…. Is this perhaps the duchess’s garden?”

The duchess.

Calling his mother not “the mistress” or “the lady of the house” but “the duchess” suggested she was not a simple servant.

The peerage system was abolished, but titles were still used conventionally in common understanding, so his mother was not wrong to be called a duchess, but still.

“That’s right. It is my mother’s garden. I am using it at the moment.”

Karl quickly grew impatient.

He was originally meant to come home two days later, but he no longer wanted to stay in Schultz, and he didn’t want to return to a Heitzrind that would be thrown into a bustle over his arrival, so he boarded the train quietly without telling anyone.

“All right. Go on.”

Adele bowed deeply to him as he raised one hand in a dismissive gesture, then quickly slipped back out through the blue garden gate.

Her heart felt ready to burst from her chest.

The person she just met called the duchess his mother. That meant the person she just saw must be Karl Clausen, the one Bailey told her about.

Good heavens.

Adele rushed out of the garden and ran.

The pounding of her heart was loud enough to hear. Passing through the rose garden with the manor coming into view ahead, her urgency only grew.

Then it happened.

“Ah!”

In her hurry, the toe of her shoe caught on a stone.

She fell hard onto the dirt with a thud.

The white apron Bailey tied around her to keep her dress clean was covered in dirt.

A large hole tore through the knee of her stocking, and red blood seeped through the gap. The blood from her knee quickly stained the white stocking as well.

Her palms were scraped too, and the hair she neatly combed before going out was a complete mess.

Tears welled in Adele’s eyes.

The pain was one thing, but the sight of herself fleeing in a panic like she committed some crime was both ridiculous and humiliating.

Master Karl was truly as handsome and dignified as Bailey described.

But looking into those cold blue eyes, so like the duchess’s, was genuinely difficult.

It was the kind of shame that made her feel, in a single glance, as though he saw right through her. The Baden family ruined, her parents gone, and here she was, a shameless orphan sponging off someone else’s home.

Adele learned at the charity school that a person could feel small even without doing anything wrong.

Going into a forbidden place was her fault, but she didn’t need to have spoken in such a frightened state.

Where did the confident Adele, so dearly loved by her mother and father, go?

Feeling just a little sorry for herself, Adele crouched beneath a rosebush, pulled her knees to her chest, buried her face in them, and cried.

The blue sky, the roses in every color, and the small golden-haired girl stayed together like a painting for a long while.

“Good heavens, Miss Adele. What happened?”

Heitzrind manor was in a state of all-out war. Everyone was in a frenzy.

Bailey was beside herself trying to attend to the sudden arrival of Master Karl, so she failed to notice that Adele returned to her room far later than the agreed time.

Only after the young master said he wished to rest and dismissed everyone was Bailey able to look in on Adele’s room.

She came in carrying a late lunch of warm bread rolls, cold vegetable soup, pickled apple, and Scotch eggs, when she found Adele with disheveled hair, a torn apron, and above all, a completely vacant expression.

“I’m sorry. I fell on the way back.”

Adele said in a small voice, thoroughly deflated.

Bailey quickly checked her over. Adele’s hands were slightly scraped, and both knees, from what looked like quite a bad fall, were seeping blood through the handkerchief she tied around them.

Fortunately, she said she washed the wounds with clean water and wrapped them with a handkerchief. Since no medicine was applied, Bailey quickly fetched the medicine box and unwound the handkerchief.

The wounds were quite large, and Bailey’s face creased into a frown.

“Good heavens. You left it like this?”

“I wanted to find the medicine box, but everyone looked so busy.”

It was the result of the young master arriving two whole days early without a word and turning the whole house upside down.

Bailey silently disinfected the wounds and dusted powdered medicine over them.

It must have stung quite a bit as the wounds fizzed during disinfection, but the child sat still. She wrapped the wounds neatly with gauze bandages.

They would likely leave a small scar, but for the size of the wounds, they were not deep, which was a relief.

“Still, you should have called for me. It’s a good thing it was just your knees. What if it had been that pretty face of yours?”

The mention of her pretty face made Adele smile sheepishly as she asked.

“It seems Master Karl has arrived?”

“Yes. He is a man of few words and impossible to read, but to arrive at the manor without any notice like this. Thanks to him, everyone is in quite a state. Stay quietly in your room today. You can’t very well go anywhere on those legs anyway.”

Bailey watched Adele pick up her spoon and take a sip of soup, then clicked her tongue and gathered the soiled clothes.

The moment she lifted the torn apron to drape over her left arm, Adele let out a small “Oh!” and quickly took the apron back from her.

“You must not stand or move during a meal.”

“I’m sorry, I had something in the apron….”

With a rustling sound, she quickly pulled the paper bag from the apron pocket.

Bailey recognized the bag as the snack she gave Adele that morning.

“You didn’t eat your snack.”

“I meant to, but I couldn’t find a good spot…. May I eat it while reading after lunch?”

Bailey nodded at Adele clutching the snack bag like something precious, then gathered the laundry and left the room.

Thinking of the girl finally running free outside after so long, a torn piece of clothing seemed like nothing at all.