Lilly could never quite make up her mind as to what were the relations between these two. Generally, it seemed as if, during long years, mutual sympathy and understanding had bound them together by indissoluble ties, though at other times they appeared to have nothing in common and to avoid each other, he with frigid hauteur, she with scorn in her squinting sidelong glances. It had often occurred to Lilly, too, that when Fraeulein von Schwertfeger was young and fair to look upon, she and the colonel might have had a love affair. But gradually she abandoned this idea, for if anything of the kind had ever existed, Fraeulein von Schwertfeger would have been far too proud to endure their present companionship, and he was too domineering to tolerate the presence of any such uncomfortable reminder of a dead amour. All Lilly could gather of the aristocratic spinster's past was that as the orphan of a poor officer she had been forced to earn her own living almost since her confirmation. She had presided over the colonel's house for nearly twenty years. That she, like herself, was without resources and dependent on the whims of the same old man seemed to Lilly to form a bond of sympathy between herself and Fraeulein von Schwertfeger, yet she never could get rid of the undefinable dread she had been inspired with at the outset. She really was indebted to her for many things. Without the spinster's untiring surveillance she must have fallen innumerable times from the straight road, which was to lead to her apotheosis as noblewoman and Lady Bountiful. When she was disposed to err on the side of over-humility, there would have been scoffers to take base advantage of it; and her easy-going manner with those who were not her equals might, if uncorrected, have got her into serious trouble. As it was, she was popular with everyone. In the kitchens and the stables, the villages and the agents' offices, everywhere she was greeted respectfully with beaming smiles. But it was in the Polish quarters, where the women dried their washing behind great fires of brushwood, that she was simply idolised. It may have been that they had got wind of her Slavonic name and her Catholicism. Anyhow, by all those poor despised foreign folk, who drifted about among the proud stolid Germans, with humility in their downcast childlike eyes and snatches of their native song on their lips, Lilly was regarded in the light of a saviour and patron saint. She loved to visit and busy herself with these gentle grateful people. She tended the sick and took compassion on the forsaken. The girls were to her like her own sisters, who needed a watchful eye over them; and as for the boys, they were a sacred trust whose welfare she would always have at heart. Fraeulein von Schwertfeger grimly disapproved of this attachment between Lilly and the Poles.