But the colonel had grown nervous. He cast challenging, pugnacious looks at the most harmless admirers and began to heap reproaches on Lilly's head. "It seems," he would say, "everybody can tell at a glance that you are no lady; otherwise you would not be the object of such a number of indelicate attentions." At any other time Lilly would have grieved bitterly. Now she listened to him with an absent smile on her lips. Her soul no longer dwelt on German soil. She was breathing the air of the beloved country on whose threshold, she thought, she was already standing. One night's ride still, a short day in Bozen, and then the gates would open. Now nothing could intervene. * * * * * It was in a section of the express that leaves Munich late in the evening and crosses the Brenner Pass in the dusk of early morning. Lilly and her husband sat in the seats by the window. The seat next to the corridor had been taken by a young man, who on assuming it had saluted the other occupants with a smile, and then paying no further attention to them had become engrossed in a book written, apparently, in Italian. So he was an Italian, a messenger from Paradise, who had come to bid them welcome. That was enough to ensure Lilly's interest. She regarded him from under lids to all appearances closed in sleep. He had a clear-cut, high-spirited face of a peculiar, milky yellow tint, without lines or shadows, as smooth as if enameled. A small, dark moustache, somewhat crispy, and the hair on the temples cropped so close that the skin shone beneath. Lilly wanted to see his eyes, too, but he kept them obstinately bent on his book, though he seemed merely to be skimming through it. What she admired most was the peculiar roundness and softness of his movements. You might suppose a woman was clothed in that black and white checked suit, which attracted her by its unusually aristocratic appearance. The silk shirt was violet and dark red, and a green necktie was tied carelessly about the soft collar. All these colours, strange as they looked, went so well together and seemed to have been selected with so much care and refinement of taste, that Lilly grew quite uncomfortable. She almost felt the young stranger was trying to force himself upon her by his manner and bearing and dress, and above all by his ostensible disregard of her. It was ridiculous; she was afraid of him. When the customs officers entered the compartment at the Austrian frontier he uttered a few strange-sounding words, which the officers understood, for they turned away from him with deep bows. At that moment he raised his eyes and let them rove about the compartment; and while the colonel was opening his bag they rested for an instant, as if by chance, upon Lilly. What singular eyes he had! They sent out sharp rays like black diamonds, yet they gave a caress, a wicked, sure caress, which asked impatient questions, questions that made one blush.