"Is it possible that you don't remember," she answered hesitatingly, "receiving a letter from a comrade in your regiment, asking you to interest yourself in a ... a lady----?"
He jumped to his feet and flushed to the roots of his hair. His pupils dilated so visibly between his wide-stretched lids that she thought his eyes were going to start out of his head.
"I beg your pardon," he stammered. "You refer to a letter which I had nearly a year and a half ago from Lieutenant von Prell?"
"Yes," Lilly said.
"But, gracious baroness," he exclaimed, completely losing his self-possession, "if I had suspected ... could have had the least idea that the gracious baroness ..." And his face depicted so much grovelling reverence that Lilly's feeling of innate aristocracy again came to the surface, but he had to be undeceived.
"I call myself Lilly Czepanek now," she murmured, congratulating herself on the happy phrase, "I call myself," which left it open for him to suppose that she had chosen voluntarily to resume her maiden name.
Alarm at the blunder he imaged himself to have committed was to be read on his features.
"I am sorry," he said; "I ought to have remembered that the gracious baroness must have gone through many trials." Then he blurted out: "Why didn't you come sooner? I waited, waited, and waited a month, six months.... Then I started searching for you, with no results; but I half thought of employing a detective, only I feared to transgress the bounds of delicacy ..."
Lilly nodded encouragingly. She appreciated his scruples.
"Unfortunately, it never struck me to search for you under another name.... So I had to abandon the hope of ever having the great pleasure ..."