She went to the window, and looked out apathetically. The bare branches shook in the wind, the ivy on the railing swayed; even the bent rose-trees, the shoots of which the old gardener had protected with straw, moved quiveringly backwards and forwards. All of them writhed in the grip of winter, and only the fallen leaves lying in heaps on the thin coating of snow were still, but they were dead eternally.
What was to be done now?
If this could happen, then all was in vain. There was no hope, no rising to loftier heights, no more strength of purpose, and no more truth. You might as well throw yourself down on the ground beside the dead leaves and die.
She heard the clatter of plates behind her. The maid-servant, as no one had rung, had come unsummoned with old Ferdinand to clear the table. She thought of Käte and of that other creature, in whose arms he had made a mock of her and of her faith in him. She dragged her lifeless legs upstairs to the only room in the house where she ever felt at home. As she passed she heard the colonel raving in his bedroom, and almost running as he paced up and down.
"Let him rave!" she thought indifferently.
Next she heard him give orders from behind the closed door for the carriage to come round.
"He may stay or go, for all I care," she thought.
She stepped on to the balcony. The icy-cold sensation that still stiffened her neck crept down her arms to her finger tips.
Over there sat Walter, employing his leisure as usual in deep study of the great Encyclopædia of Agriculture. He lifted his hand every now and then wearily to his brow and knocked the ash from his cigarette against a flower-pot without looking up. He hadn't time to look up. Good God!
Confronted by this abominable farce, enacted solely with the object of deceiving her, Lilly was seized with such mad, accusing fury that she was rendered almost senseless. A pricking and stinging ran through her benumbed arms. Then an excruciating burning fever throbbed painfully in her temples and hung a blood-red curtain before her eyes.