At last when Hermine was out in the kitchen smearing up with her finger the bit of jam that remained on the platter from the Palatschinken, Tante Ilde spoke the name Pauli had come to hear ... Corinne ... and stupid Anna didn't care. It was the mention of Fanny that she could not have borne. Anna never caught the truth about anything. "I'm going to have dinner with Corinne on Friday," Tante Ilde said finally, a soft radiance spreading over her face, and turned her eyes, suddenly a lovely azure, full upon him. "Corinne is an angel." Perhaps Tante Ilde shouldn't have said that right there before Anna, in Anna's own house, but Anna created an unendurable vacuum about herself, it made people want to throw something, anything into it to fill the horrible void. "She thinks you are one," answered Pauli with a sudden deep breath, and there was a note in his voice that his wife, or at least his daughter, standing at the kitchen door, should have noticed. Then his eye wandered to the only bit of color in the room,--the scarlet cloth covering his zimbalon. "Shall I make a bit of music, Tante Ilde?" he suddenly cried with an indecipherable gesture, and laid his cigarette down on his plate, where wastefully in Anna's eyes, it smoked its life away. He pushed his chair back from the table and getting up uncovered the instrument without another word. He was suddenly one vast flame of love for Corinne. He knew the feeling well,--consuming, he was really beside himself ... in an instant ... like that. He began to play a wild Czardas of his mother's land. The light grew brighter in his eyes, the color deepened in his face, but it was of a moonbeam woman, shadow-thin, that he was thinking. The music beat mercilessly upon the three listeners, with its cruel, splendid life-throb, with its piercing intimation that even a thousand years of love would be all too short for the longing heart. From time to time he emitted a wild cry and his nostrils would dilate; his body swayed rhythmically above the instrument. He was indeed "thirsty in the night and unslaked in the day."... Anna remembered the short love-madness Pauli had once wrapped her in and pressed her hand against her flat breast. Tante Ilde thought, too, of things forever gone,--not of love, that was too far off, but of her lost dignity and use, of all that would not, could not be again; she had no time to wait upon events.