Overcome with weariness, Lilly sank into a swelling white bed, with gleaming brass rods draped in light blue ribbons, the bows of which perched there like great exotic butterflies.
It was these butterflies which the next morning carried her from a doze into full wakefulness, into the new existence.
From the ceiling hung a gilded lamp with opaline shades and blue silk covers over the shades. A white-enamelled wainscoting about four or five feet high ran about the entire room, and the walls between the wainscoting and the ceiling were panelled in silk of the same light blue as the counterpane and scarfs set in frames of white enamel.
All this was revealed by a beam of light, which came in through the narrow space between the curtains and threw a shining bridge across the Persian carpet of a yellowish colour intertwined with blue.
Joyfully Lilly sprang out of bed and trod on the carpet, which seemed to ripple in waves, so soft and long was its nap.
Nothing of the colonel was to be seen or heard.
Long before, he had told Lilly his bedroom would be apart from hers. "But it cannot be far off," she thought; "it must be on the other side of that shining white carved door."
Opening it softly she peeped into the next room.
The window curtains had scarcely been drawn aside. The bed, a huge piece of dark mahogany, was empty, though the crushed sheets and pillows testified to its having been occupied. There were engravings of racers on the wall, tall boots, whips, pistols, some uniforms, and on the round side-table a rack for pipes, and next to the bed the tube of gout ointment. So, the evening before, though it was her sacred duty to massage him, he had treacherously done it himself.
She felt hurt, and then a little shudder ran through her. It was all so strange and hard, as if mysterious threats were lurking somewhere.
She hastily shut the door and retreated into her sky-blue silk realm.
Her room had two other doors, one of which opened on the corridor. This was the one through which Miss von Schwertfeger had led her in the night before.
Lilly shuddered again. Without question, without asking permission, the thin, melancholy person of the extinct eyes and commanding manners had taken possession of Lilly. The colonel and his housekeeper had exchanged a glance, a brief glance of mutual understanding, which, on the colonel's part, said: