"Did you not envy her?" said Thea, to whom Werner had formerly confided his great love of travel, and the fact that with all his economy he could only contrive to take a short journey every other year. "Just a little," he replied; "but we had one memory in common of one of her smallest journeys and of my largest one. After the Paris Exposition she went to Trouville." "You were there too, Bernhard, and just at that time," said Thea. "Oh, there must have been many people there at that time of whose existence I was entirely unaware," Bernhard said, hastily; but something in his tone of voice and in the expression of his face struck Thea, and, little prone as she was to suspicion, the thought occurred to her, "He knew her." "Of course, society at Trouville is so mixed," said Werner, "and so various, that it is impossible to know every one. Frau von Wronsky seemed not to have enjoyed her stay there very much." "Naturally." Thea turned to her husband. Had he spoken the word, or had she been mistaken? "What do you mean?" she asked. "I said nothing," he replied. "Heavens, Thea, you have an entire agricultural library here!" Lothar exclaimed at this moment. He was never quiet long, and while the others had been conversing he had been walking about the room on a tour of discovery in search of new books or pieces of furniture. He was now standing before a pretty open set of book-shelves, from which he took several books and brought them to the table. "Since when have you been perusing works upon drainage, irrigation, and plans for factories?" he asked, laughing, and pointing to the titles of the volumes. Thea blushed, and piled the books together. "Don't be so rude as to disarrange my books, Lothar," she said, as she took up some to put them away again. But Bernhard detained her. "Thea," he said, "now I understand where your 'ideas' came from. Have you really been studying all this tiresome, dry stuff, and was this what you meant the other day when you declared that you had discovered an excellent antidote for ennui?" "Why, of course, I wanted to be able to talk about all these things with you, and to know something at least of what is absorbing your thoughts," she said, with a still brighter blush, forgetting for the moment both her guests and Frau von Wronsky, as she noted the expression of her husband's eyes. The next instant she turned away, with a laugh, to rearrange her books. Bernhard looked after her with an emotion that he would have found it difficult to express: never had she seemed to him so enchanting, so charming, as at this moment. Lothar laughed; Lieutenant Werner looked grave, and, when Thea again joined the group around the table, gave her a glance of intense admiration. A servant announced that tea was served in the dining-hall, and thither the party repaired. Thea tried to lead the conversation to the Wronskys again, but Bernhard persistently changed the subject whenever they were alluded to.