She got ready for a walk and gave a few directions to Adele, the new servant, who was an elderly and rather patronising woman, thoroughly accustomed to service in the households of single ladies. Instead of waiting for her carriage, she took the tramway out to Grunewald. She alighted at the boundary where smart villadom ends, and the maltreated woods rise high above the yoke of the builder, and walked on straight ahead, not knowing where she was going.
A few motor-cars rushed by, and young men in them smiled and beckoned to her. They might have been actual acquaintances or only making fun of her; but, anyhow she thought it wiser to turn off the main-road, so she struck into the sandy path that ran along the lake to the old Jagdschloss. Here far and wide she saw not a human soul.
The chilly March wind swept over the milky-blue water and agitated the reeds and rushes. Ice was still to be seen round the edge of the lake, but it was so thin and pierced with holes that every small ripple that broke on the shore sent up jets of spray. From the pine-branches there sounded now and then the song of a bird, sad enough to extinguish awakened expectations of spring.
"It looks more like spring in the town than here," thought Lilly. But the keenness of the wind, full of the pungent scent of moss and pine-needles, did her good. As she strode along, she met it full in the face. Her cheeks glowed; she felt her frozen blood thaw and send fresh life pulsating through her languid limbs.
Suddenly she burst out laughing. Everything was all nonsense. Her pining discontent, her longing, Richard's snobbish ambition, his mother's everlasting marriage schemes--even respectability was humbug.
What had she to do with it all? She--the free, the wild, the ruined Lilly? There must be something better in store for her, something nobler. Not in Dr. Salmoni's sense--God forbid!--but something hardening, pure, and life-giving, like this March wind sweeping through her veins.
She heard a sound from the top of a pine-tree with which she had become familiar in the park at Lischnitz. It was a kind of whistle, half-defiant, half-enticing, which ended in a sharp "Tschek-tschek." She stopped, looked up, and whistled too. It was a couple of squirrels that had been chasing each other in corkscrew circles round the trunk, and now stood suddenly still in alarm at the sight of her.
"Tschek-tschek!" she cried, to incite the little red-coats to a new game, but, not succeeding, she stooped and picked up a pebble.
Just as she was in the act of throwing it, she caught sight of a pair of eyes fixed on her from behind another trunk--large, questioning, astonished eyes, that narrowed and darkened as they gazed, as if they wanted to look away, but couldn't--a pair of eyes that surely she had known long, long ago.
But no! she had never seen them before; for the young man who had watched with her the squirrels' game and stood with his hat in his hand, still half hidden behind a tree, was quite a stranger to her. If she had ever met him, she would never have forgotten it. It would not be easy to forget that serious, self-contained, Greek young face, with the sensitive, slender-bridged nose and the lustrous eyes of the dreamer.