Even playing on the piano was denied her. The yellow old instrument of torture, the keys of which resembled the decayed teeth of a smoker--just like the colonel's--was not to be replaced by a new piano until autumn, when they would go to Danzig to select one. She thought of the times preceding her marriage, hardly more than half a year ago, as belonging to her long-vanished youth. She would have ridiculed one who had told her, youth still lay ahead of her nineteen years. It was good that over there in the lodge a witness of her sweet, foolish past was living along in madcap thoughtlessness. This alone persuaded her that her maiden days had not been a mere dream, that she had not been a colonel's wife from the cradle upward. In all this time she had met her merry friend only at Sunday dinners, when he played a comic rôle making his jerky reverences in his long frock coat. Sometimes when standing on her balcony at twilight behind the foliage now closegrown, she saw him at his window in the lodge cutting capers with his wild little red fox of a dog. A feeling would then come over her that the only person who actually belonged to her in this alien world was yon light-haired good-for-nothing, who pursued all the maids on the demesne. Old Maggie told tales. At night he would ruin the toughest horses trying to get back from his secret excursions before dawn; and in his den behind closed shutters-- At this point Maggie lost her faculty of speech. The things that took place behind those closed shutters must have been dreadful. CHAPTER XVII One red August morning Lilly, sprinkled with dew from head to foot and clasping a bunch of dewy roses in both arms, entered the dining-room, where Anna von Schwertfeger, tall and thin in her greyish blue linen dress, was standing at the table smiling to herself. It was not her manner, it was not her greeting; both were as usual. It was an intangible something which instantly caused Lilly to realize that an extraordinary event had occurred. Katie, she noticed, who helped Ferdinand with the serving, had red eyelids and kept gnawing her lips while setting the table. Katie was of finer material than the average servant girl, her father having been a teacher, and was very pretty besides; owing to which qualities Miss von Schwertfeger had selected her as Lilly's special maid. When Katie left the room, Lilly began to ask questions. In reply Miss von Schwertfeger merely kissed her with redoubled tenderness, and observed: "Why should you sully your pure young spirit with such ugly things? If certain people are bent upon breaking their necks, that's their business. We cannot help them." "Breaking their necks--that must mean Walter von Prell," thought Lilly, and said aloud: "After all this is my home, and nothing that happens here in my future province"--she modestly said "future"--"ought to be kept from me." Miss von Schwertfeger yielded to her arguments.