"So long as that? I can scarcely believe it."
"And it is not quite over, for see, they call out the singers over and over again."
Nan watched with pleased smiles while from the galleries came continued applause, tempestuous clappings of hands with cries for "Knote! Knote! Knote! Bravo! Bravo!"
"It is an enthusiastic audience. These Müncheners do always so," said Nan's companion. "We do not fear to applaud when we like a thing."
At last the outer curtain was dropped, but even then the calls and clappings went on, but that was the last of it for the tenor would not appear again.
Nan went home in a dream. She followed Frau Burg-Schmidt mechanically into the car, and sat down, her vision still filled with the picture of Lohengrin disappearing from view in his swan boat. She scarcely heard when Frau Burg-Schmidt said good-night to her.
"Here is your corner, my dear," she told her. "You are but a few steps from your door and you have your key, so I will not wait for I must change here and my car comes."
Nan had but a few steps to go before she stood in front of the great door of the building in which was her pension. She felt in her bag for her key. Fräulein Bauer had said there would be a light burning and a candle set for her. She fumbled around for some minutes but could not find her keys. She tried the handle of the door; it would not turn. In Munich evidently everything was closed up early. She stood wondering whether she should ring the Hausmann's bell or the one of the pension when some one passing saw the white figure standing there and halted, then passed on, but presently returned. Nan shrank into the shadow of the big door. Suppose the young man should speak to her, for a young man she could see it was from the single swift glance she gave. What could he think of a girl alone in the street after ten o'clock?
Suddenly the Lohengrin vision faded and she was only Nan Corner in a strange city in a foreign land trying to get into her boarding-house. She pressed the electric button under the name of the pension, and again began to search in her bag for the keys, turning toward the light as she did so, the better to see.