Dinner is over, and the gilt chandelier in the garden-room, where coffee is usually served, is lighted. Selina is sitting at the piano accompanying Fainacky, who is singing. Paula is in her own rooms with her mother, inspecting the latest additions to her trousseau, just arrived from Vienna. Lato has remained in the garden-room, where he endures with heroic courage the sound of Fainacky's voice as he whines forth his sentimental French songs, accentuating them in the most touching places with dramatic gestures and much maltreatment of his pocket-handkerchief. After each song he compliments Selina upon her playing. Her touch reminds him of Madame Essipoff. Selina, whose digestion is perfect so far as flattery is concerned, swallows all his compliments and looks at him as if she wished for more.

On the wide gravel path, before the glass doors of the room, Olga is pacing to and fro. The broad light from door and window reveals clearly the upper portion of her figure. Her head is slightly bent, her hands are clasped easily before her. There is a peculiar gliding grace in all her movements. With all Treurenberg's efforts to become interested in the newspaper which he holds, he cannot grasp the meaning of a single sentence. The letters flicker before his eyes like a crowd of crawling insects. Weary of such fruitless exertion, he lifts his eyes, to encounter Olga's gazing at him with a look of tenderest sympathy. He starts, and makes a fresh effort to absorb himself in the paper, but before he is aware of it she has come in from the garden and has taken her seat on a low chair beside him.

"Is anything the matter with you?" she asks.

"What could be the matter with me?" he rejoins, evasively.

"I thought you might have a headache, you look so pale," she says, with a matronly air.

"Olga, I would seriously advise you to devote yourself to the study of medicine, you are so quick to observe symptoms of illness in those about you."

She returns his sarcasm with a playful little tap upon his arm.

Fainacky turns and looks at them, a fiendish light in his green eyes, in the midst of his most effective rendering of Massenet's "Nuits d'Espagne."

"If you want to talk, I think you might go out in the garden, instead of disturbing us here," Selina calls out, sharply.

Lato instantly turns to his newspaper, and when he looks up from it again, Olga has vanished. He rises and goes to the open door. The sultry magic of the September night broods over the garden outside. The moon is not yet visible,--it rises late,--but countless stars twinkle in the blue-black heavens, shedding a pale silvery lustre upon the dark earth. Olga is nowhere to be seen; but there---- He takes a step or two forward; she is walking quickly. He pauses, looks after her until she disappears entirely among the shrubbery, and then he goes back to the garden-room.

It is Selina's turn to sing now, and she has chosen a grand aria from "Lucrezia Borgia." She is a pupil of Frau Marchesi's, and she has a fine voice,--that is to say, a voice of unusual compass and power, which might perhaps have made a reputation on the stage, but which is far from agreeable in a drawing room. It is like the blowing of trumpets in the same space.

His wife's singing is the one thing in the world which Lato absolutely cannot tolerate, and never has tolerated. Passing directly through the room, he disappears through a door opposite the one leading into the garden.

Even in the earliest years of their married life Selina always took amiss her husband's insensibility to her musical performances, and now, when she avers his indifference to her in every other respect to be a great convenience, her sensitiveness as an artist is unchanged.

Breaking off in the midst of her song, she calls after him, "Is that a protest?"

He does not hear her.

"Continuez done, ma cousine, I implore you," the Pole murmurs.

With redoubled energy, accompanying herself, Countess Selina sings on, only dropping her hands from the keys when she has executed a break-neck cadenza by way of final flourish. Fainacky, meanwhile, gracefully leaning against the instrument, listens ecstatically, with closed eyes.

"Selina, you are an angel!" he exclaims, when she has finished. "Were I in Treurenberg's place you should sing to me from morning until night."

"My husband takes no pleasure in my singing; at the first sound of my voice he leaves the room, as you have just seen. He has no more taste for music than my poodle."

"Extraordinary!" the Pole says, indignantly. And then, after a little pause, he adds, musingly, "I never should have thought it. The day I arrived here, you remember, I came quite unexpectedly; and, looking for some one to announce me, I strayed into this very room----" He hesitates.

"Well?--go on."

"Well, Nina, or Olga--what is your protÉgeÉ's name?" He snaps his fingers impatiently.

"Olga! Well, what of her?"

"Nothing, nothing, only she was sitting at the piano strumming away at something, and Lato was listening as devoutly as if she----"

But Selina has risen hastily and is walking towards the door into the garden with short impatient steps, as if in need of the fresh air. Her face is flushed, and she plucks nervously at the lace about her throat.

"What have I done? Have I vexed you?" the Pole whines, clasping his hands.

"Oh, no, you have nothing to do with it!" the Countess sharply rejoins. "I cannot understand Lato's want of taste in making so much fuss about that slip of a girl."

"You ought to try to marry her off," sighs the Pole.

"Try I try!" the Countess replies, mockingly. "There is nothing to be done with that obstinate thing."

"Of course it must be difficult; her low extraction, her lack of fortune,----"

"Lack of fortune?" Selina exclaims.

"I thought Olga was entirely dependent upon your mother's generosity," Fainacky says, eagerly.

"Not at all. My father saved a very fair sum for Olga from the remains of her mother's property. She has the entire control of a fortune of three or four hundred thousand guilders,--quite enough to make her a desirable match; but the girl seems to have taken it into her head that no one save a prince of the blood is good enough for her!" And the Countess actually stamps her foot.

"Do you really imagine that it is Olga's ambition alone that prevents her from contracting a sensible marriage?" Fainacky drawls, with evident significance.

"What else should it be?" Selina says, imperiously. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing, nothing; she seems to me rather exaggerated,--overstrained. Let us try this duet of Boito's."

"I do not wish to sing any more," she replies, and leaves the room.

He gazes after her, lost in thought for a moment, then snaps his fingers.

"Four hundred thousand guilders--by Jove!"

Whereupon he takes his seat at the piano, and improvises until far into the night upon the familiar air, "In Ostrolenka's meads."