"At the three oaks? Oh, now I understand your little game!" Magelone said in a low voice to Otto.
"You are mistaken," he whispered; "all this is a surprise to me——" but Elfrida did not permit him to proceed. "No whispering, no plotting," she cried. "Get your hats and gloves, and come immediately."
"But my dress," said Magelone, looking down at her blue muslin gown.
"Ah, madame, you look charming, as you always do," Herr von Rothkirch assured her. "This blue drapery seems woven by fairy hands to deck the fairy queen."
Magelone smiled graciously; coarse as the compliment was, it was better than none at all.
"Aunt Thekla, what do you say? Shall we go?" she asked, and her tone betrayed her wish to hear a 'yes' in reply.
"My child, I do not know," the old lady answered. "To celebrate a birthday outside of one's family circle,—I don't know what my brother would think——"
"The Freiherr must come too," Elfrida interposed. "Hurry, Magelone; we will go bring him. I will tell him that we Klausenburgs as good as belong to the family——"
"Elfrida!" Amelie admonished her sister in a whisper, and tried to detain her by her gown; but with a twitch she extricated herself,—rather sacrifice a flounce than a whim,—drew Magelone away with her, and sang as she hurried to the Freiherr's room, in her thin shrill soprano, 'Give me your hand, my darling.' Herr von Rothkirch expressed his belief that the Freiherr could not possibly resist twin stars of such beauty and wit.
But he did. He consented 'gruffly,' as Elfrida expressed it, that his family should take part in the festival, and even insisted that Johanna should join the rest. He himself, he said, was an old man, and not fit for such merry-makings. He made no allusion to the Klausenburgs' having arranged the party in his grandson's honour, and intimidated the overconfident young lady who had gone to him to such a degree—how, she could not herself tell—that she declared to Magelone that no power on earth should induce her ever again to cross the threshold of her grandfather's study. "How strange it is," she added, "that the most amiable of men should be the grandson of that ogre!"