After him came a rosy-cheeked, bare-footed girl, with a huge faggot in her arms—and presently the great gaping hearth was filled with a roaring blaze. And Steven, in a wadded dressing gown, stretching his limbs to the warmth, began to feel able to review the events of the day with a more settled spirit.
... No doubt there had been several instances at dinner, when he had felt himself in an outrageously false position—allowing (he thought severely) to that mist of lies with which the Burgravine had undoubtedly filled the atmosphere. Triumphantly as her beauty had stood the morning light, exquisitely as her elegance, her fashion, her youth, might have struck any impartial observer by contrast with the gloom of the mediæval castle, Steven, on the second meeting, had found himself cold to her, ashamed in the recesses of his heart of his previous surrender. He wished women would not think it necessary to deceive.... Why, in the name of common sense, could not the creature have told the simple truth? His visit had been a mere freak—an intrinsically harmless one. She must needs give it an aspect of guilt by an unnecessarily complicated farrago of explanation. It had taken him all his time indeed (and no wonder he could not look back upon that endless repast without a shudder) to parry the Burgrave's point-blank questions concerning people of whose very existence he had no knowledge, and to respond airily to the Burgravine's feverish hints, finding himself, meanwhile, further and further involved in myths and inventions. And, throughout, the Burgrave—what a deuced uncomfortable way of staring was his!—had an eye and a laugh that matched each other very ill.... And the child, Sidonia, with now that look of scorn, now that air of grave rebuke, under which his already irate feelings in regard to her almost merged into active dislike....
Cross-purposes had in truth begun on the very threshold.
"Welcome, Herr Graf," had cried the Burgrave—"welcome both as my wife's kinsman and as a distinguished traveller in my own country!" He had been clasped by two genial hands. So far so good!
"But—your companion, your worthy tutor, where is he?" (His tutor! The man meant Geiger-Hans. This was awkward.)
Steven had no answer ready, nothing but a foolish obvious statement:
"He has not come."
How lame it sounded! The Burgrave had instantly dropped the subject.
Now that he came to think of it, Steven realized that it was here his discomfort took birth. Why had his host dropped the subject? It was a procedure that harmonized neither with the relentless scrutiny of his eyes, nor the ultra-joviality of his manner. And all through the dinner it had been simply variations on the same motif. A straight question, an unsatisfactory answer, the complication of the Burgravine's embroidery and over-clever suggestion—and the subject dropped. Thereupon an access of hilarity on the part of his entertainer ... such loud laughter, such unmirthful eyes!
As Steven, staring unseeingly into the fire, repassed the little scenes in his mind, his cheeks flushed.