His jaw dropped, his eyes grew round; he reeled back against the hind wheel of the yellow car.
"Drive on!" called Lilly to the cabman.
She leaned back in her corner with a sigh of relief, and yet with a slight sense of guilt at having got rid so lightly of the old love.
The whole way she heard the puffing of a slowly progressing motor behind her, and when she descended from the cab, Richard got out of his motor at a little distance, but near enough for her to see an expression in his eyes like that of a whipped dog.
She ran up the four flights of stairs as if pursued by furies, forgetting all about her box. A moment afterwards the cabman came up, panting under its weight, and when she offered him his fare he declined to take the money.
"The gentleman downstairs," he said, "has already settled everything."
CHAPTER XX
It was the evening of the next day. The carriage, which was bearing Lilly to the most dreaded interview of her life, drew up at the door of the Unter den Linden Restaurant, which had been a favourite haunt of the beaumonde for generations. Although Lilly had not been there for a long time, she knew every inch of it. She knew, too, the giant commissionaire, Albert, who stood at the entrance and laid his hand respectfully on his braided cap. It was he who of old used to apprise her of the approach of the handsome officer of Hussars. With downcast eyes and her head pressed against Konrad's shoulder, she glided past him, trusting that he no longer remembered her.
"Uncle, this is Lilly!"
An old gentleman below middle height, with bow legs, and in an ill-fitting lounge-jacket and limp collar, came swaggering out of a private room and held out to her a broad fleshy hand, the skin of which was as loose and brown as a dog-skin glove. She cast a shy, scrutinising glance at this all-powerful person, whom she had pictured as a man of commanding presence and iron will, and who, after all, was only a shaky, corpulent, rather common-looking dwarf.