She laughed a tired joyless laugh. Evidently his one desire was to forget what had passed as speedily as possible.
"It doesn't matter now," she said, "whether we call each other by our Christian names or not."
CHAPTER XXI
Fear, the same unreasoning fear that had taken possession of Lilly during her engagement, consumed her again. It paralysed her spine, bound her arms, and made her knees shake and the veins in her neck throb. It wrapped her brain in a blank impenetrable darkness. But after the first meetings were over and nothing occurred to excite the smallest gleam of suspicion, her fear died down, leaving behind it an ever-ready watchfulness, a tension at all times on the lookout for awkward questions, a warily assumed innocence by which to avoid pitfalls.
Extraordinary to relate, the colonel saw nothing. He who was the most jealous and suspicious of husbands, utterly devoid of illusions, was for once blind. He even swallowed the headache myth, and came to sit on her bed in half-playful, half-cynical sympathy to help Fräulein von Schwertfeger change the compresses, which she prepared with over-zealous attentiveness. To submit to this woman's caresses taxed her heavily, for behind them was a furtive pair of eyes that strove to look harmless, yet could not disguise their insatiable curiosity.
As anxiety with regard to her husband gradually lulled itself to sleep, the more wakeful did it become in the case of the self-sacrificing female friend, who at any moment might assume the rôle of a full-fledged enemy and traitor.
Lilly dared not cry till night, when she was alone, and then she would spring out of bed to wash away traces of her tears, only to cry herself to sleep after all.
It was not remorse that she felt, nor shame, nor yearning love, but simply an unfathomable loneliness, a dismayed facing of the question "What next?"
Would it be confession and retirement into a convent, or elopement and suicide?--events which in Frau Asmussen's old novels had been the quite ordinary sequel to such a misdeed.
A week went by. Her headache was well. She had been up again quite a long time, but hadn't seen him. Not a vestige of him was to be seen when, with the doors of her room bolted, she rushed on to the balcony to look across at his quarters.