"Till then, I kiss in all constancy your slim and refreshingly large hand.
"Yours,
"Already reformed,
"Walter von Prell."
Lilly found this letter, on the morning but one after the foregoing events, stuffed in the mouth of the pea-shooter, which reposed innocently against the balcony glass doors. It cannot be said that it gave her unlimited satisfaction. There were expressions in it that raised scepticism with regard to the sincerity of his conversion. Yet his assurances of amendment were so frank and concise, one could not doubt that the sentiment that prompted him to make them was genuine. It was only that he could not give up the incorrigible levity with which he expressed himself. Those who loved him must tolerate this eccentricity, whether they liked it or not.
She kissed the letter and put it inside her blouse, that it might rest there comfortably for a little while before being torn up.
In the afternoon she went for a stroll round the castle, and found under the balcony a heap of fir-branches freshly gathered, out of which a rung or two of the buried ladder greeted her confidentially. Pleased at this tender evidence of his pain at parting from her, she ran on to the boggy outskirts of the park, and marvelled every now and then at the easiness of renunciation.
Yet it proved not so easy after all. She began to discover this during the next few days of reaction, when life seemed hollow and barren of excitement, when the sad grey autumn hours passed drearily and evening came, followed by morning, apparently without rhyme or reason.
She did not did in Anna von Schwertfeger's society the solace and support she had hoped for. Although her friend did not withdraw her promises, she remained behind a wall of reserve, which made any close and loving intimacy out of the question. It almost seemed as if she was afraid of being implicated in the sinner's guilt, if she encouraged Lilly's advances.
At this time Lilly had to put up with a great deal from the colonel. His outbursts of ungovernable fury now fell on her, as on the rest of the household. But what she dreaded more was the gloomy, threatening glance he fixed on her at moments when she sat indulging in quiet introspection; she felt instinctively that something was in his mind that boded her no good. She began even to fear that he had got wind of her affair with Prell. But Fräulein von Schwertfeger would not hear of such a thing.