But one thing she did not learn: to consider the brief span during which she had wandered on the heights as a mere episode that had interrupted her true, modest life like a caprice, a dream. In her consciousness she was and remained a sort of enchanted princess in the guise of a beggar until it pleased Providence to reinstate her in her own. She solicitously cherished everything reminding her of her vanished glory. The gala robes the colonel had had made for her in Dresden hung in Mrs. Laue's wardrobe; her underwear embroidered with the seven-pointed coronet filled Mrs. Laue's empty drawers with their blossom-like delicacy, and in a long row in front of the tall mirror in Mrs. Laue's best room lay the superb toilet articles of ivory and gold which had once been the pride of her "boudoir." These, too, still bore the seven-pointed coronet. Lilly would have considered it an outrage upon her most sacred rights had she had to part with them. And all the time she awaited the future. She still studied advertisements, and wrote letters applying for positions; but the advertisements were usually forgotten and the letters seldom mailed. However, feeling the need of occupation and companionship, she got into the habit of sitting with Mrs. Laue in the back room and helping her with her work. Soon she, too, was tapping, pasting, daubing, threading, and weaving just like her teacher. Having inherited taste and talent for everything artistic she soon outstripped Mrs. Laue. After having sold the shades Mrs. Laue would relate without envy how the patterns she designed and set together were instantly recognised and preferred. Lilly's ambition was aroused. She strove to create works of art. She could not toil enough. "If you wouldn't fool such a time over every little spray," was Mrs. Laue's criticism, "you would make more money than I do." After each transaction Mrs. Laue honestly settled accounts with Lilly. But Lilly was satisfied with the forty or fifty marks a month that her work brought in. Her newly aroused fancy flew toward higher goals. The dried grasses, the "grass flowers," as Mrs. Laue called them, charmed her especially. Their slender, aspiring stalks, the delicate grace of their branchings, the weary mourning of their hanging sprays, caused them to resemble tiny trees, weeping willows at the edge of a brook, ash-trees inclining over marble urns, or palms longingly rooted on parched rocks. Lilly dreamed of a new sort of art--paintings on transparent glass with foregrounds of dried grass; lamp shades and window shades, on which woods of flowering grass and ferns charmingly shaded pasteboard houses standing out in relief with their windows cut out to let light shine as if from within; fleecy clouds, glowing sunsets, ridges of hills in hazy outline, and dark blue rivers, across which the moon threw swaying bridges of light.