Lilly hesitatingly gave it to him, and added the request that in no circumstances should he come to see her. He bowed again, and his coolness became rigidity. But Lilly rejoiced that she had known so well how to keep him at a distance. Nobody in the wide world should call her a beggar. She therefore took leave all the more graciously, for she had not come to him in order to frighten him away forever. He was quick to profit by her warmer tone, and became ardent again. If there was anything else he could do for her--if she felt lonely--and required company. Lilly looked at his right hand, saw no wedding ring there, and smiled "no." He understood look and smile, for he said, hemming and hawing in an endeavour to conquer fresh confusion: "I live alone with my mother, but unfortunately I cannot take you to see her because she is sickly and since my father's death has withdrawn entirely from society. But I would be most careful as to the company to which I should introduce you." "I took that for granted," Lilly replied with amiable condescension. "In spite of that--thank, you, really--in the peculiar position I am in it is better for me not to mingle with people." She gave him a regal bow, held out her hand, and left. He followed her respectfully, and the six young gentlemen stood up in a row and curved their backs like their employer. With flushed face Lilly passed the partially completed decorations in the yard, and walked along the imitation marble entrance to the street, thinking, in mingled triumph and disenchantment: "No, that was _not_ a path of destiny." But she had suddenly acquired a betrothed. That was something, at any rate. CHAPTER IV Mr. August Kellermann, though unsuccessful in selling his pictures, enjoyed a fair reputation as a painter. He was a knowing fellow of about thirty-five, seven times washed in the life of the metropolis, who got great amusement from his own astuteness. He had a sandy Rubens beard and small bleared eyes with an eternal yawn in them from the night before. He lived in an abandoned photographer's studio of enormous dimensions, like a huge glass case. To keep out the glare and the heat he had hung oriental rugs under the skylight, propping them up on long poles, and their fringed ends hung down as in a Beduin's tent. When Lilly stepped from the dim anteroom into the glare of the diffused light from above--it was so high it seemed a very part of the heaven--she found him in a puce-coloured sack coat and worn green unheeled slippers, over which hung his red-checked stockings. He was squatting on the floor next to an oriental coffee tray poking at a narghile that had gone out. "Lordy!" he exclaimed without responding to her greeting and without rising. "It's worth receiving such a visit." Lilly prepared to withdraw. Then he shot to his feet like an arrow, hoisted his trousers with a shrug of his shoulders, and wiped the dust from a bamboo chair with his sleeves.