Lilly now heard a story which filled her soul with horror and pity--the story of the house she lived in, the story of which she was the concluding chapter. The colonel, who had always been a man of violence and a mad voluptuary, had insisted upon taking in pupils in housekeeping under the pretext that when he came home on leave, he had to have youth and jollity about him. He reserved for himself the choice of the pupils. In this way only those came whom he had decided upon in advance. For a long time Miss von Schwertfeger noticed nothing amiss. But the servants began to tell her stories of secret orgies and mad chases on the upper floor, of how the colonel pursued girls clad in glittering raiment--the colonel had always liked transparent robes of silver. Miss von Schwertfeger's eyes were completely opened when some of the girls attempted suicide. She left. But she was poor and accustomed to command, and she could not endure subordinate positions. Dreadful distress was the result. The colonel had not lost her from sight; and when it seemed to him she had sunk low enough, he again offered her the position of housekeeper in his castle, promising she would have nothing to complain of. She crawled back to him like a starved dog. Soon he broke his word, and the indecent goings-on began again. But she no longer had the courage to resist. She learned to be blind and deaf when lewd glances were exchanged at table and screams and laughter penetrated to her room during the night. She even learned to keep curious servants at a distance, and throw a cover of concealment over the house's shame. Her relation to the girls became motherly. "I shouldn't be surprised," she interposed, "if he hadn't made the same proposition to you, saying I would take care of you." The fateful evening in which she had become the colonel's betrothed arose in Lilly's memory. While walking about her greedily, still in a state of indecision, he had spoken of a fine, aristocratic woman under whose protection she should live in his castle until she had grown into womanhood. Miss von Schwertfeger went on with her recital. She described how rage at the disgraceful position she was in ate into her soul like a malignant cancer, how it finally took sole possession of her being to the exclusion of every feeling except the desire for reprisal. His marriage should furnish the weapons. She would be blind and deaf, just as she had been compelled to be before. Nothing else. She would simply let matters take their natural course. Thus she had acted until that night. And that night the sword must surely have fallen on Lilly and the colonel; but at the last decisive moment she realised her strength would not hold out. That young, good-natured, guiltless yet guilty wife, had become too dear to her. She could not sacrifice Lilly to her scheme of revenge. "I thought you said you hadn't acted out of love for me," Lilly ventured to interject.