Adele was still in bed. Why shouldn't she be? There was nothing for her to do.
When Lilly opened the door of her room she displayed unbounded delight. She even shed tears of satisfaction, and Lilly all at once realised what she was losing in her.
Everything shone brightly in the morning sunshine. The flowers had been watered. The bullfinch flapped his wings in greeting, and Peterle nearly broke the bars of his cage to scramble up on her shoulder. She scarcely knew whom to attend to first--out of sheer happiness and affection.
There were three letters and two telegrams on the salver. The letters were in Richard's handwriting; the telegrams were addressed to Adele, urgently demanding the address of her vanished mistress.
In the meantime her master had given up his courtship, and returned to Berlin. He had advertised in the papers, and came every day to see if there was any answer. He sat in his old place and drank his tea as usual, afterwards smoking cigarettes till it was time to go back to the office.
Had she mentioned Konrad? What did the gnädige Frau take her for? Adele hoped she understood better than that how to look after her mistress's interests. And now the best thing for the gnädige Frau to do was to come back and act just as if nothing at all had happened. That is what her former ladies had always done.
Lilly asked her to fetch down the smaller of her two leather trunks from the attic, explaining that she wished to take away with her a few things which had belonged to her before. As Adele sullenly obeyed, Lilly collected Konrad's letters from their secret hiding-place, then ran to her big wardrobe, snatched the dresses from the pegs, and piled them on the bed to choose what she would take.
It was now that she thought of "The Song of Songs." She went down on her knees before the escritoire. The roll of music, which had been lying for years at the back of the bottom drawer neglected and forlorn, had assumed a different aspect. The elastic band that held the sheets together had become slack and sticky, and fell to pieces when Lilly touched it: The crumpled sheets slipped out of her hand and fluttered over the carpet. There they lay--the arias, the recitations, the duets, and the connecting orchestral passages--all in confusion, and on the top the "Turtle Dove" solo for the clarionet, which she had hummed with her mother almost before she could lisp. Dismayed, she gazed at the scattered sheets. They had turned yellow and musty. Several were stained with her own blood, which had flown from her veins after her mother's assault on her with the bread-knife. The bloodstains entirely obliterated many of the notes. Others had been gnawed away with the paper by mice at Schloss Lischnitz. And this was what it had come to, her "Song of Songs."
It held out no message of hope now; it was no refuge for the future. No faithful Eckart, no guide to dizzy golden heights. It was a mere derelict, used up though never used, a time-honoured bit of lumber that one drags about without knowing why--an extinguished light, a masterpiece of wisdom that had become meaningless.
Shrugging her shoulders, she hastily gathered together the disarranged rolls of paper and tried to thrust one inside the other, regardless of how they came--she was in such a hurry!