The colonel wishing, on account of his mÉsalliance, to avoid his many military friends, did not stop over at Berlin with Lilly, but went directly on to Dresden, which they reached in three hours.

He had engaged rooms at Sendig's, and the proprietor had done his utmost to fit up snug and aristocratic quarters for the newly-wed couple. Sitting-room, bedroom, and bath—that was all they needed. Close companionship, the outer appearance of intimacy, would naturally bring about inward intimacy.

The colonel had good cause, indeed, to be satisfied with his honeymoon!

He, who in the course of his many amours had probably dandled hundreds of girls on his knees, who thought he knew women through and through, the tart and the sweet, the chaste and the coquette, the sensitive and the bold, the genuine and the flashy, those who confined their coy caresses to a man's hand and lower arm, and those who hung on men's lips biting and sucking them in a wild frenzy, he, the old voluptuary, to whom nothing feminine ought to have been strange, stood astounded, incredulous before this lovely marvel.

So much abandon and so much pride, so much tenderness and so much fire, so much ready comprehension and so much artless childishness, all mingled in one dreamy, laughing Madonna head, had never before presented itself to him, for all the fine art he had exercised in his rouÉ's career.

What touched him most and completely puzzled him was the modesty of her desires, the fact that she made no demands of any sort.

When they took dinner À la carte he might be sure her eye would travel to the cheapest orders for herself; and the expression with which she would sometimes prefer a request to be allowed to drink orangeade, was as hesitating and shamefaced as if she were making a love avowal.

One day, on returning from the Grosser Garten by way of side streets, Lilly stood still in front of a poverty-stricken little provision shop. As a rule nothing could induce her to look into shop windows, and the colonel, curious as to her interest in the place, extracted from her the confession that she loved sunflower seeds—and would he be very angry if she asked him to buy some?

The more he overwhelmed her with gifts, the less she seemed to realise that money was being spent for her sake.

The long dearth she had suffered prevented her from appreciating the value of money, and whatever he put into her purse she handed out again without hesitation to the first beggar she met on the street. Then again it smote her conscience when he gave a flower girl two marks for a rose.

Once, upon her doing one of these incredible things, which usually sent the colonel into epicurean transports, he was seized with sudden distrust.

"I say, little girl," he said, "are you an actress?"

Lilly did not even understand him. She looked at him with the great, sad eyes of innocence she always made on such occasions, and said:

"What are you thinking of! Since papa left I haven't even seen an actress. I haven't been inside a theatre once."

That very day he ordered a box, and she danced about the rooms with the tickets in her hand wild with joy.

But her delight was dampened by his injunction to wear evening dress. Lilly could not comprehend why one should have to bare one's neck and shoulders in order to be edified by "The Winter's Tale." Besides, the magnificence of the gowns filled her with discomfort. She would walk in awe about the gleaming gala robes as circumspectly as about a thicket of nettles. The colonel had had them made when in a giving mood, for no real purpose, since it was impossible, of course, for the present to introduce Lilly to society.

When she appeared before him stiff and constrained, her eyes severely fixed, her cheeks, however, glowing with the fever of festivity, her delicately curved breast half concealed in a nest of white lace, the fabulously exquisite chain of pearls about her swan-like throat—taller, lither, apparently, more of a blossoming Venus than ever—the old robber was seized by intoxication in the possession of his booty, the magnificent gown came near being consigned to the wardrobe, and the tickets to the waste basket; but Lilly begged so hard, that he choked down his feelings, and got into the carriage with her.

The colonel thought he had long ago outlived the banal delight of shining in the eyes of strangers. He found he was mistaken. The old bachelor experienced a new, unexpected sensation, to which he gave himself up disdainfully, though feeling immensely flattered. After a time he accepted his triumph as a matter of course.

The instant Lilly appeared in the box the whole house had eyes for her alone. The handsome, aristocratic couple, whose very being together aroused speculation, busied everybody's imagination, and as soon as the lights went up at the end of the first act, the whispering and questioning and pointing of opera glasses began anew.

Lilly had never before been in a box, and on entering she had started back instinctively, feeling confused and alarmed. But accustomed as she now was to implicit obedience, she took the chair to which the colonel pointed without a word of protest. When she realised she was the object of general attention, the old numbness came over her. She felt as if the woman sitting there speaking and smiling were not herself but someone else whose connection with her person was purely accidental.

She did not awake from her torpor until the hall was thrown into darkness again, and the curtain went up. Then the play wafted her to the land of the poet, breathless, exulting, dismayed.

After this, two Lillies sat in her seat—the one in blissful self-forgetfulness flitting on the rainbow-coloured wings of childlike fancy through heavens and hells; the other making precise gestures like a wound-up doll, unconsciously imitating the manners of the well-bred; at the same time feeling a strange, hot, torturingly sweet sensation creep over her being: the intoxication of the vain.

The triumph he had celebrated in the theatre was not enough for the colonel. On returning to the hotel he did not have supper served as usual in their rooms, but led Lilly to the general dining room, where a gypsy band was playing and elegant folk of all descriptions were spreading their peacock feathers.

The game of the box was repeated in all but one respect. Lilly, carried away by the dreamy magic of the violins, dropped some of her coyness. Her cheeks glowed, her eyes swam, and stretching herself a bit she ventured to take a tiny part in the sport.

Two tables off sat a blond young man in full dress—white shirt front and black tie like all the others. He kept staring at her with hot persistence, as if she were a strange animal.

She moved uneasily under this gaze, which caressed and gave hurt, which spoke wild words in a foreign tongue, yet was nothing else than that sob of the violins which feverishly quivered through her limbs, up and down her body.

Suddenly her husband faced about and surprised the admirer in the very act. He stabbed him with one of his piercing glances, and soon the miscreant vanished.

The colonel's mood seemed to be spoiled somewhat.

He said, "It's time to go," and led her upstairs.

When he had her to himself, joy in his possession got the upper hand again, mounting to a sort of triumphal ecstasy.

Others might pasture on the delights of her evening attire; the winsome asperity of her childlike features, on which life had not yet left its traces, were good enough for display down there in the dining room—off with the pearl chain! Down with the laces!

He wanted her without covering of any sort, wanted to drink in with greedy eyes the secret of her proudly blooming body, wanted to satiate his hungry old age with the long-forbidden charms of strange, stolen youth.

Lilly, helpless, without will of her own, did what she had often done. In shame that flamed afresh each time, she allowed him to tear the last veil from her body. She threw herself on the carpet and rose again—she danced, she posed as a worshipper, as a maiden in distress begging for help, as a MÆnad, a water-carrier, a coquette laughing between her fingers—as anything he wished.

This evening there was an additional something, which burned in her blood like venom. A diffident desire, which was really a feeling of repulsion—a love that clung to him in grateful self-abandon, while secretly hankering for something else—for the sobbing of violins and the hiss of conflagrations, a purple heaven dotted with stars, and the deadly sweet yearning that dwelt in Hermione.

When he had had his fill of the spectacle—and this came soon because of his years—he made her don the loose gauze shirt worked with silver thread with which he had presented her at the very beginning of their stay in Dresden. Before he went to sleep she always had to dance in it a while. Although the metal woof was icy cold and pricked like needles, she soon became accustomed to it, since his will was her law. Then, while she sat beside him on the edge of the bed, he smoked a cigarette in bed, and laughingly retailed smutty jokes; which he called, "singing his baby to sleep."

Henceforth it was the colonel's pleasure to take meals in the common dining room. He wanted to re-experience the prickly delight of seeing his young wife admired and regarded with desirous eyes. The value of his property seemed to be enhanced in the degree in which people smiled, and envied him the possession of it.

As for Lilly, she always took interest in perceiving the drunken sensations of that evening arise in her again. With drooping lids she might feel the silent flame of hopeless desire burn in so many hot young eyes round about. And, carried away by the lamentations of the violins and the hymns of the cymbals, she might flee to those dark and blessed distances to which the way had been barred—she did not know by what—since the hour her great happiness had come to her.

Never did she permit it even to occur to her to return one of the glances that forced themselves upon her by so much as the quiver of her lids. The young men remained mere figurants on her stage, as necessary as the other accessories, the lights, the music, the flowers on the white napery, and the cigarette smoke ascending to the ceiling in blue spirals.

Nevertheless it happened that one day while she was walking along the street on her husband's arm a look pierced to her heart.

It came from a pair of dark eyes, which from afar had been turned on her in a friendly, searching manner. On coming nearer they flared up, as with a flash of recognition, into a sad fire.

She felt as if she would have to hurry after the passerby and ask:

"Who are you? Do you belong to me? Do you wish me to belong to you?"

She was incautious enough to turn around and look back at him.

For only the fraction of a second!

But the incident had not escaped her husband. When she faced about again, she saw his vigilant eyes resting upon her in distrust.

And he nodded several times as if to say:

"Aha! That's the point we've gotten to already, is it?"

He remained absorbed and ill-tempered the rest of the day.

That encounter was only the first of an endless series for Lilly.

To be sure, she never met the same young man again, despite her diligent watch for him; but a host of others took his place.

Passersby no longer remained mere figures in a dissolving view, through whom one looked as if they were non-existent. When she saw a slim man at a distance whose contour and bearing appeared youthful she wondered while waiting for him to draw near:

"What will he be like? Will he look at me?"

If he found favour in her eyes, and if his glance was not impudent, yet was full of astonishment or desire, she would often feel a pang, which said to her:

"You suit him far better than this old man at whose side you are walking."

And each occurrence saddened her.

It saddened her also if one she was pleased with happened to pay no attention to her.

"I'm not good enough for him," she would think. "He scorns me. I wonder why he scorns me."

In the dining room, on the BrÜhlsche Terrasse, and at other elegant places where there is a constant crossfire of furtive glances, her bearing in its relation to her environment began gradually to change. She acknowledged the incense offered her by a little grateful uplift of her eyes, and she looked without embarrassment directly into the faces of the scrutinising ladies; and although she had the keen vision of a falcon, she would gladly have turned a lorgnette on them. But of this she did not venture to breathe a word to the colonel.

She was often tormented by the desire to bury her eyes in those of the man looking at her, without decorum, without fear, without reserve—just as he was doing. It would have been a mystic union of souls which would do her endless good. Of this she no longer harboured a doubt. She was starving, starving, starving—as she had never starved in her life.

The colonel seemed not to notice in the least what was going on in her, though a state of bitter warfare existed between him and all whose glances besieged her. The eyes of the old Ulan were ever on the look-out, and the one who was too persistent, ardent or melancholy was stabbed with a dart from his eyes.

It happened, however, that some paid no attention to his threats, and even had the audacity to return what they received with raised brows. This would cause him uneasiness. He would play with his card case and begin to write something, then put the pencil back into his pocket, and, as a rule, wind up with:

"It seems to me we've strayed into bad company. We'd better be going."

Despite his uncomfortable experiences he could not get himself to live alone again with his young wife. Habituated from youth up to motley associations, he required noise and light and laughter. But his suspicions waxed, and finally fastened upon Lilly, too.

He forbade the matinal visit to church, to which she clung so ardently.

What she had done, following a mere impulse, after the first awaking at his side, had by and by become a custom; and while he slept his profound sleep she dressed without making a sound and slipped out into the freshness of early morning.

Going to church served as a pretext.

Generally all she did was dip her fingers in the holy water and make her three genuflections. Sometimes she even contented herself, untroubled by scruples, with merely passing the church.

For here was an hour of golden liberty, the only one throughout the day.

First she hastened to the Augustus bridge to offer her breast to the winds always blowing there and watch the waters course by far below. Then she walked along the banks of the river, usually at a wild pace, in order to gather in as large a harvest of pictures and incidents as possible before creeping back to her husband's home.

Everything the hour brought was pregnant with significance.

The early morning mist lying red on the hills and descending to the river in golden ribbons; the chorus of the bells in the Altstadt; the first timid bursting of the boughs already russet with sap; the joggling carts on their way to market; the hissing and sparking of the swaying wires when the trolley-pole of an electric tram swept along underneath them—all this was joy, it was life.

Since she was not threatened with a gift in consequence she ventured also to look into shop-windows, and greedily, in amazement, devoured every morsel of art.

An end to all this from now on!

The gates suddenly swung shut through which she had escaped for a single hour her perfumed life-prison overheated by desire and indolence.

But she was so soft and pliant that she yielded without a murmur even in her innermost being.

It was his wish—that was sufficient.

Such a quantity of love lay fallow in her soul and cried for activity that in this time of inner conflicts she proffered him a double measure of tenderness. She had to, whether she wished to or not, whether her thoughts dwelled with him or glided off on the viewless path of dreams.

She was his slave, his plaything, his audience; she dressed him, admired his good looks, rubbed his hips with ointment, adjusted the hare's skin about his loins to protect him against his gout; brought him his sodium carbonate when he had eaten too much; massaged his grizzled head with hair tonic, the pungent perfume of which nauseated her, and stood by to help and advise when he trimmed his moustache.

She did it all with eager devotion and ingenuous confidence, as if in ministering to her husband she had found the end and aim of her existence.

Nevertheless he lost his supernatural, god-like qualities in her eyes, became nothing more to her than a man, knightly to be sure, but whimsical and vain; for all his mental force intellectually indolent; for all his sensitiveness utterly brutal, and for all his thirst for love an oldish man, whose powers had long been enervated.

Not that she ever put it in this way to herself.

Had she seen his characteristics so clearly she might have come to hate and scorn him; for she was too immature to know that the witch's cauldron of worldly life brews the same out of most men's souls, provided the great feelings grow grey along with a man's hair, and he has erected no altar for himself at which he may seek refuge while sacrificing to it.

But the picture her fancy had made of him shifted and changed colours from day to day, taking on now one aspect, now the reverse, until a little pity mingled with her terrified respect, and her childlike relation to him was tinged by a certain motherliness, which would have been ridiculous had it not had its roots in the unfailing warmness of her heart, which transmuted another's weakness into cause for her solicitude.

Oh, if only she had not had to starve so!

Starve, when sitting at a festive board each day decked anew with choice viands.

Every morning Lilly eagerly read the theatrical and musical announcements posted in the hotel lobby, only to be drawn away swiftly by the colonel, who in his little garrison town had lost all interest in the arts. For lack of exercise his organs for perceiving and enjoying had lost their functions, and he shrank back petulantly from the intellectual work she expected of him.

Everything in which he took pleasure, the exaggerated gaiety of the music halls, the display of physical strength and agility, the loud colours, soon became an abomination to Lilly after her first curiosity had been stilled.

Wild horses, the colonel said, could not drag him to Shakespeare or Wagner again, then certainly not to a concert, the object of Lilly's profoundest cravings.

One day she saw an announcement of the Fifth Symphony, which was bound to her childhood days by a thousand ties. She maintained silence, as was proper; but when she reached their room she threw herself on the bed and cried bitterly. He questioned; she confessed. With a bored laugh he made the sacrifice and took her to the concert.

She had not been at a concert since her father's last performance.

When she entered she trembled, and suppressing her tears, drew the air in through her nose.

"You snuffle like a horse when he smells oats," joked the colonel.

"Don't you notice there's the same atmosphere at all concerts?" she asked in a joyous tremour. "Our concert hall at home smelt just like this."

But he had not noticed the similarity of smell, and he did not recall the Fifth Symphony.

"Such matters—" he began.

She was indifferent to all that preceded the symphony. She wanted to hear nothing but that trumpet call of fate which had once filled her, when just blossoming into womanhood, with a shudder of foreboding.

The call came and knocked at people's hearts, and set the knees of all those a-tremble who, companions and fellow-combatants, filled with the same fear and the same impotence, writhed like worms under the blows of fate.

Her husband amusedly hummed:

"Ti-ti-ti-tum, ti-ti-ti-tum." That was all he understood of it.

Turning about softly to urge him if possible to keep still, she noticed for the first time a profusion of yellowish-grey hair growing in his ear. It disgusted her.

"If he has hair in his ears," she thought, as though that were the reason of his deafness to music. A profound despondency seized her. Never again would she rejoice in the beautiful, never again stretch arms in prayer to wrestling heroism, never again quench her thirst for a higher, purer life at the sources of enthusiasm.

Between her and all that stood this man, who sang "ti-ti-ti-tum," and in whose ears there was a little bush of hair.

The soft consolation of the violins died away unheard, the melancholy acquiescence of the andante found no echo in her soul, and the triumphant jubilation of the finale—it brought her no triumph.

Tortured, debased, undone in her own eyes, she left the hall at the side of her yawning husband.

But her vital energy was too sound, her belief in the sunniness of human existence too lively to permit her to succumb to such moods.

Moreover, an event occurred which lent new wings to her being and flushed her with the intoxication of bold hopes.

Though little was said about plans for the immediate future, it was settled that they should remain in Dresden, or some other large city, until May, and then go to Castle Lischnitz, where the household, as always in the master's absence, was conducted by the oft-mentioned Miss Anna von Schwertfeger.

The colonel, forever hovering between trust and distrust of his young wife, was seized one evening by a fresh attack of doubts, and tried to get a view down to the bottom of her soul by questioning her as to how often and whom she had loved before she met him.

Unsuspecting as always, Lilly blurted out her two little experiences.

She told of Fritz Redlich first—because that had been the greater love—and then of the poor, consumptive teacher.

Despite his petty misgivings her husband's judgment had remained clear enough to appreciate the trustful purity of her conscience, and he sent his doubts to the devil with the laugh he usually reserved for his vulgar jokes.

But Lilly wanted to see his emotions stirred, and warming up over her own words, she described the lessons on the history of art and told of the yearnings to see Italy which the poor moribund had enkindled in her with the flame burning in his own heart.

Her cheeks glowed, her eyes swam beneath lids drooping as if with the weight of wine; she dreamed and fantasied, and scarcely heeded his presence.

Suddenly he asked:

"How would it be—would you like to go there?"

Lilly did not reply. That was too much bliss.

He began to consider the matter seriously. Instead of poking in one place and vexing himself over all sorts of stupid people, a man might just as well take a seat in a railroad coach and make a short day's run down to Verona or Milan.

She flung her arms about his neck, she threw herself at his feet—it was too much bliss.

Life now became absolutely unreal, a constant change from ecstasy to anxiety and back again, because something might intervene to prevent the trip.

First of all he had to have a pair of knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, such as every aristocratic traveller wears. Then there were a dozen other hindrances.

The fact was, he probably felt he had grown too unwieldy to keep pace with her in her ability to enjoy herself. But something occurred to hasten their departure.

The last few days, the colonel noticed, they had been followed by a pale, bull-necked individual, six feet tall, who tried with stupid pertinacity to attract Lilly's attention.

To judge by the man's appearance he was a tourist of the Anglo-Saxon race. His manners indicated a certain loftiness, and the colonel's threatening looks glanced from him without leaving the faintest trace.

Lilly saw her husband fall for the first time into a lasting mood of thoughtfulness. He paced up and down the room, repeatedly muttering:

"I'll have to box his ears," or "I'll have to look for a second."

The next day, when the colonel observed the importunate person trotting about ten feet behind them, he veered about suddenly and accosted him.

The blond Titan looked him up and down without so much as removing the short pipe from his mouth.

"I may look at anyone I want to, and I may go anywhere I want to," he declared.

With that he slightly shoved up the sleeves of his overcoat and struck a boxing attitude, which, foreboding a street row, stifled all desire for a knightly mode of chastisement.

The colonel in a final attempt to settle the matter in an honourable fashion handed the stranger his visiting card, which was received with a friendly "Thank you, sir." And the colonel's opponent stuck the card in his pocket evidently without the least inkling of the ominous import of the formality. Passersby began to gather and there was nothing left for the colonel to do but turn his back.

The upshot of the rencontre was that the Englishman now assumed the right to honour Lilly and her husband with a greeting, and the colonel, who tried to drown the consciousness of having made himself ridiculous in a torrent of oaths, decided to leave Dresden immediately. This was about the middle of April.

In Munich, where they stopped off a few days to render homage to the HofbrÄuhaus, nothing especial occurred.

But the colonel had grown nervous. He cast challenging, pugnacious looks at the most harmless admirers and began to heap reproaches on Lilly's head. "It seems," he would say, "everybody can tell at a glance that you are no lady; otherwise you would not be the object of such a number of indelicate attentions."

At any other time Lilly would have grieved bitterly. Now she listened to him with an absent smile on her lips. Her soul no longer dwelt on German soil. She was breathing the air of the beloved country on whose threshold, she thought, she was already standing.

One night's ride still, a short day in Bozen, and then the gates would open.

Now nothing could intervene.

It was in a section of the express that leaves Munich late in the evening and crosses the Brenner Pass in the dusk of early morning. Lilly and her husband sat in the seats by the window. The seat next to the corridor had been taken by a young man, who on assuming it had saluted the other occupants with a smile, and then paying no further attention to them had become engrossed in a book written, apparently, in Italian.

So he was an Italian, a messenger from Paradise, who had come to bid them welcome. That was enough to ensure Lilly's interest.

She regarded him from under lids to all appearances closed in sleep.

He had a clear-cut, high-spirited face of a peculiar, milky yellow tint, without lines or shadows, as smooth as if enameled. A small, dark moustache, somewhat crispy, and the hair on the temples cropped so close that the skin shone beneath.

Lilly wanted to see his eyes, too, but he kept them obstinately bent on his book, though he seemed merely to be skimming through it.

What she admired most was the peculiar roundness and softness of his movements. You might suppose a woman was clothed in that black and white checked suit, which attracted her by its unusually aristocratic appearance. The silk shirt was violet and dark red, and a green necktie was tied carelessly about the soft collar.

All these colours, strange as they looked, went so well together and seemed to have been selected with so much care and refinement of taste, that Lilly grew quite uncomfortable. She almost felt the young stranger was trying to force himself upon her by his manner and bearing and dress, and above all by his ostensible disregard of her.

It was ridiculous; she was afraid of him.

When the customs officers entered the compartment at the Austrian frontier he uttered a few strange-sounding words, which the officers understood, for they turned away from him with deep bows.

At that moment he raised his eyes and let them rove about the compartment; and while the colonel was opening his bag they rested for an instant, as if by chance, upon Lilly.

What singular eyes he had!

They sent out sharp rays like black diamonds, yet they gave a caress, a wicked, sure caress, which asked impatient questions, questions that made one blush.

The next instant nothing had happened. He was bending over his book as before and seemed not to notice her.

But her husband scrutinised her with watchful cunning, as if he had found a something in her face for which he had long been searching there.

When the train started again the colonel disposed himself to sleep. For the sake of greater comfort he chose the unoccupied seat next to the corridor. The stranger in order not to be opposite him instinctively moved nearer to the centre, by this greatly diminishing the distance between Lilly and himself. A little more and he would have been sitting directly face to face with her.

If she had harboured an arriÈre pensÉe, she would have bestowed more attention upon her husband's sleep. But all her senses were engaged in the desire to avoid the stranger, whose proximity pricked her with a thousand needles.

She pressed close into her corner, and spasmodically stared out of the window, where the illuminated interior of the coach was reproduced on the black background as in a dark mirror.

Thus she could observe the stranger quietly, without his catching her in an occasional raising of her lids.

The light of the ceiling lamp sharply lit up his smooth, soft cheeks, whose even sheen merged into bluish darkness at the temple, a cheek formed for pressure and petting. To let your hand stray over it gently must be a great delight.

And what long, dark lashes he had, longer than her own. Their shadow formed dark semicircles reaching to the finely cut nostrils.

Suddenly he raised his eyes and looked at her.

There it was again, that black-diamond, caressing gleam, cold, yet how seductive!

She started in fright, and grew still more frightened at the thought that he might have noticed her fear.

He smiled a very, very faint smile and continued to read.

Her fancy wove more and more anxious, flattering thoughts about him, thoughts tantamount to a crime, which weighed upon her like a nightmare of which she could not rid herself.

Suddenly—an icy stream poured over her heart—she felt a soft, tender pressure on her left foot, which she must have moved nearer to the centre quite involuntarily, for only a short time before it had been close against her right foot, and her right foot touched the outer wall of the compartment.

What should she do?

A rebuking "I beg pardon!" an angry flaring up, would have roused the colonel and given occasion again for suspicion, perhaps even for an encounter. So she slowly withdrew her foot, using the utmost caution, and pressed it against the wall to prove to herself she had rescued it.

But those few moments of hesitation, she knew it well, had made her particeps criminis, and this consciousness tormented her as the thought tantamount to a crime, which she had permitted to obsess her before.

Dishonoured, besmirched, she seemed to herself, a prey to each and any man that waylaid her path.

Why find fault with him? The thing he had impudently desired, was it not the fulfillment of her own impure wishes?

This notion fairly stifled her. She wanted to jump up, cry aloud, and beg for forgiveness. The stranger continued to read quietly, as if nothing had occurred.

When Lilly started out of a state of wakeful torpor a grey day was peering in through the window. She saw a foaming torrent tumbling into depths below, and beyond gigantic green masses towering into the heavens. It was a picture she had seen only in her dreams, convincing in its greatness, dwarfing all else with its might.

What she had experienced before falling asleep was now a grotesque dream and had lost its vital essence.

She looked about the compartment cautiously.

The stranger was lying stretched out in repulsive sleep. His cheeks swelled and sank as he puffed heavily. He looked sallow and effeminate, and disgusted her.

She turned more to the side and suddenly saw her husband's wide-open eyes resting upon her with a rigid, chastising look. She started as if caught in guilt.

"Are you awake already?" she asked with a constrained smile.

"I didn't sleep a wink all night," he replied.

Something in the tone of his voice set her a-tremble. It was both a rebuke and a sentence.

And how he looked at her!

They rode on without speaking. Lilly utterly disregarded the stranger.

At the hotel in Bozen the colonel entered Lilly's room and said:

"My dear child, I have something to say to you. I am tired of the annoyances to which we are subjected day after day. To what extent your appearance and conduct are to blame, or to what extent my age is the cause, I will not discuss. However that may be, I do not reproach you with gross infringement of the laws of duty or good taste. And I may not demand a grande dame's matter-of-course reserve of one who two or three weeks ago was serving behind a counter. To teach you propriety requires time, and it is a matter that I may leave entirely without qualms of any sort to Miss von Schwertfeger. We will take the noon train back to Germany and we will reach Lischnitz day after to-morrow in the evening, perhaps earlier in the day."

Lilly did not even grieve, she felt so humiliated and bruised.

And the land of her dreams sank below the horizon.