Frau Laue tapped at her lamp-shades, the fried potatoes frizzled in the fat-lined pan; the stove in the lobby smoked, and the frowsy poor-people's odour exhaled a welcome to all who came within its radius. She did not cry her heart out of her body, as she had done after her expulsion from the castle. She neither lapsed into a dazed apathy nor wrestled desperately with fate. Instead, she felt that a grey yawning void stretched before her endlessly, the silence of which was broken now and then by a shrill cry of almost animal longing and despair, a sense of feeble submission to the inevitable, a consciousness of being incarcerated without hope of escape, a baffled slipping down into life's dark depths, a dreary death unmarked by grace or dignity.
Between to-day and to-morrow--the to-morrow that seemed to beckon from every corner--Lilly's tearless eyes saw the railings of the bridge that her feet had tested on the way home from "Rosmersholm." And, as she stared into space, she beheld the dark, purple-flecked waters rolling languidly on far below, and heard the iron chains clank under her feet.
This sound grew into a perpetual sing-song that accompanied everything she did, floated over and swallowed up everything that the eventless days brought forth. It pierced her brain, hammered in her temples, and throbbed painfully in every nerve and pore of her body.
Only one word was set to this haunting melody, and that was "Die." Yes--die. What could be simpler? What more irresistible?
Die! not to-day; but to-morrow perhaps, or the day after. Something might happen yet. A letter might come, or he himself. Or if not this, who could know that fate was not holding some other miracle of good fortune up its sleeve?
So it was worth while living to-day, to drag through its countless hours of deadly monotony.
Then one evening, a week after Konrad's sudden departure, Frau Laue appeared in Lilly's room at an unaccustomed hour. Her manner denoted determination.
"Now look here, Lilly dear," she began. "Things can't go on like this. If you were crying your heart out I shouldn't say anything. But, as you are acting now, matters will never mend. There is only one sensible course that you can take; you must return to your Herr Dehnicke. If he had any inkling of how things were going with you here, trust him, he would have come and taken you away long ago. So I tell you plainly, either you sit down and write him a nice letter or I shall leave my work in the lurch and go straight off to his office to-morrow morning. He'll pay my expenses fast enough."
Lilly felt a strong impulse to turn the old woman out of the room, but she was too depressed to do more than turn away from her with impotent distaste.
"I haven't too much time to spare now," Frau Laue continued; "the dozen must be completed before bedtime.... But you can make your mind easy as to one thing. If he is not here by ten o'clock to-morrow, he'll be here by twelve, for I shall have gone to fetch him. Good-night, Lilly dear."