Her life now became an alternate dream of ecstasy and a fever of anxiety, for something might always happen to prevent their going. First, they had to wait for the knickerbocker suit, which he ordered at a tailor's as the correct get-up for travelling, and then there were a dozen other delays. The truth may have been that he was pondering whether he could command enough youthful agility to keep pace with her excessive élan and capacity for enjoyment.
Then a certain incident hurried on their departure. For several days they had been shadowed by a fair-haired, bull-necked young man, six feet in height, who with stubborn pertinacity tried to attract Lilly's attention. Judging by his appearance he was probably an Anglo-Saxon tourist. There was in his manner a lofty nonchalance which rendered him absolutely indifferent to the threatening darts of the colonel's eyes.
For the first time Lilly saw her husband plunged in deep thought. He paced the room, muttering to himself repeatedly, "I shall have to box his ears"; or, "I must find a second."
The next day, when this irrepressible person followed them at a few yards' distance across the Schlossplatz, the colonel wheeled round and confronted him.
The fair giant measured him from top to toe without removing his short pipe from between his lips.
"I may look at anyone I choose to," he said in broken German, "and I may go anywhere I choose to."
He made a gesture as if he meant to turn up his coat-sleeves and struck an extremely pugilistic attitude, which discouraged all idea of inflicting on him a chivalrous correction.
The colonel, with a final attempt to bring the matter to an honourable issue, handed him his visiting-card, which the stranger put in his pocket with a friendly "Thank you, sir," without evidently the least notion of what this formality portended. A little crowd began to collect, and there was nothing left for the colonel but to turn his back on him.
The result of this passage of arms was, that in future the Englishman considered it his right to bestow on Lilly and her husband a greeting when they met. And the colonel, who tried unsuccessfully to stifle his consciousness of having made himself ridiculous in a torrent of oaths, resolved to leave Dresden on the spot.
In Munich, where they stopped a few days, it being the middle of April, to pay their respects at the Hofbräuhaus, nothing happened of a ruffling nature. But the colonel had become nervous. He cast furious and intimidating glances at the most harmless admirers, and began to heap reproaches on Lilly's head. It seemed as if everyone at a first glance, he said, could divine she was not a lady, otherwise she would not attract so much vulgar notice. At another time Lilly would have been bitterly grieved, but now she was unmoved. She only smiled absently, for her spirit was far away, and already she fancied that she breathed the air of the promised land, on whose threshold she believed she was standing. One night more in the train, a short day in Bozen, and then the magic gates would swing back. Nothing now could prevent the fulfilment of bliss.