They went on staring.
“I could not help, as I sat here, hearing what you were saying.”
They stared as speechless as though they had been caught killing somebody.
“I really am not a spirit,” said I, getting up. “Look—do I look like one?”
And striking a match I playfully passed it backward and forward across my features.
But its light at the same time showed me a flush of the most attractive and vivid crimson on Frau von Eckthum’s face, colouring it from her hair to her throat. She looked so beautiful like that, she who was ordinarily white, that immediately lighting another I gazed at her in undisguised admiration.
“Pardon me,” I said, holding it very near her while her eyes, fixed on mine, still seemed full of superstitious terror, “pardon me, but I must as a man and a judge look at you.”
Jellaby, however, unforgivably ill-bred as ever, knocked the match out of my hand and stamped on it. “Look here, Baron,” he said with unusual heat, “I am very sorry—as sorry as you like, but you really mustn’t hold matches in front of somebody’s face.”
“Why sorry, Jellaby?” I inquired mildly, for I was not going to have a scene. “I do not mind about the match. I have more.”
“Sorry, of course, that you should have heard——”