From above the door Franz Joseph continued to smile paternally down upon her, opposite him his beautiful and luckless Empress. The banished Zita and her children struck a further absolving note of innocence and misfortune. Frau Stacher returned gratefully the benevolent look her Emperor was bending upon her, remembering that he too, had "had it hard." As she slipped deeper into that comfortable chair she was conscious of being so tired, so spent that she feared she could never again get up. Yet it was almost delicious, the sense of languor--in that deep chair--in that warm room. An immense gilt basket in which was planted a young fruit tree in full blossom stood near one of the windows. It was tied with bright, blue ribbons, but its flowers were very pale in the hard January light. What was it doing there in mid-winter? She breathed in the faint scent of the forced blossoms hovering about the warm air. Ah, how indeed could she move out of that chair, how close that door behind her on that atmosphere of welcoming abundance? She was sitting near the little table on which stood Fanny's collection of elephants. One in pink jade with ruby eyes seemed to be looking compassionately at her. Then she wondered, but without impatience, why Fanny didn't come. Fanny _was_ taking longer than necessary, but suddenly she had found that she could not bear to meet her aunt's eyes. Oh, those eyes! They would gaze at her as children's eyes gaze and she dreaded the feeling she knew she would have when she met them, right out, in daylight, in her own house. Behind that closed door Fanny was in a blue funk, Fanny who would have faced armies without turning a hair, and she fussed nervously with the objects on her dressing table and kept looking quite unnecessarily at her shining, softly-rolled back hair with her hand-glass.... "Why doesn't Fanny come?" her aunt began to ask herself again somewhat anxiously and in her humility feared it was something connected with herself. Just then the front door bell rang and she jumped in her chair, a flush mounting to her face. She couldn't at all have said what it was she feared might be impending but whatever it was, that ring made a genteel old lady start up when she was too tired really to move and blush the bright blush of her long lost youth. Maria ran out of Fanny's room, in what seemed to her an anxious way, to open the door. But she only took in a box, a large, flat, pleasant-looking box, the sort of box Frau Stacher remembered from her own shopping days. She saw the name Zwieback on it as Maria took it in to the other room. Another long wait ensued. She could hear whispers and the rustling of tissue paper. Then all of a sudden the bedroom door was flung open and Fanny appeared, holding high up, so that it hid her face, a long, black coat. In a flash, before a word could be said, Tante Ilde knew that coat was for her....