"Why, it's a veritable paradise!" she said gaily, though tears were rising in her eyes.
"Here is one more room," said Mr. Dehnicke, opening a door which Lilly had failed to notice. "It has a separate entrance from the hall of the house. The lady probably uses it as a guest room, or something like that. If you were living here, it would do admirably for a place for your assistants to work in."
Lilly looked in. The room was more simply furnished than the others, though not without care. In the middle of the floor stood a wide table with greenish grey upholstered chairs standing about it, and in a corner was a comfortable iron bed.
"If you had it, of course, the bed would have to be removed," explained Mr. Dehnicke.
It was really remarkable how well the apartment suited her purposes.
They returned to the drawing-room. Lilly was struck by something she had not observed before. A long picture in an ornate carved frame hung over the sofa, forming, as it were, the centre about which all the rest of the furnishings were grouped. But the picture itself was concealed beneath a curtain of lavender crape.
Mr. Dehnicke shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the top of the secrétaire, where a photograph, the only ornament there, had the same mysterious veil.
Seized with curiosity Lilly tried slightly to raise the lower end of the covering over the large picture.
"I wonder whether I may," she queried timidly, as if about to commit a theft.
"If you have the courage," he replied, apparently breathing a little more heavily than usual.
She tugged--tugged more violently--the crape fell off--and before her hung her friend and betrothed, Walter von Prell! There he stood in the uniform of his former regiment, boldly and carelessly dashed off in crayon.
Lilly's knees trembled. Cold shivers ran through her body. She refused to believe, to understand. Then she felt Mr. Dehnicke take her hand and draw her to the outside hall.
On the porcelain plate she now read what she had previously been unable to decipher:
She uttered a cry, rushed back into the drawing-room, threw herself in the corner of the sofa, and wept the hot, blissful tears of desire and yearning that had so long been repressed.
When she ventured to look up again, she saw Mr. Dehnicke waiting before her, modest and correct, with his sober, serious face.