She in turn was too proud to accept so munificent a gift and blew it back to him.
Thus laughing and tossing themselves about, they kept the leaf whirling between them, and suddenly in the heat of the struggle their lips touched--touched and would not separate.
The next instant they held each other in close embrace, and the instant after she was his.
The rill purled, the leaves fell as before. But a fiery mist lay upon the earth, and all over small suns winked rainbow coloured eyes.
She fell back without thinking and noticed that the heavens above were also clothed in fire.
Her comrade sat beside her with his back curved like a berated schoolboy and rubbed his nails against one another.
"Oh, let's go home," said Lilly, downheartedly.
"As my lady commands," he replied, grotesquely respectful again.
Apparently he was concerned with getting rid of what had happened as speedily as possible.
"Oh, now it's all the same," she sighed; "now we can quite calmly call each other by our first names."
First came dread, the same senseless dread that had dominated Lilly's being before her engagement. It stiffened her limbs, bound her arms to her body, crippled her knees, beat against the walls of the veins in her neck and created a black void in her brain.
But after she had gone through the first meeting with Von Prell and nothing fateful occurred, her fear died down and what remained was a searching attentiveness, a readiness to jump aside at the least sign of danger, a tense anticipation of ticklish questions to be answered properly and pitfalls to be avoided with a crafty assumption of innocence.
The colonel noticed nothing--he, the most suspicious of married men, with the keenest scent, who harboured the least illusions concerning the opposite sex, he noticed nothing. He even believed the headache myth and lavished mocking yet tender pity upon her, while he sat at her bedside laughing and helping her change the compresses that Miss von Schwertfeger had solicitously prepared.
It was more difficult for Lilly to endure the woman's caresses. Behind them lurked a squinting pair of eyes, shy, heedful, and endeavouring to look harmless, while, in spite of themselves, revealing a greedy desire to know.