An imperious stamping before the door, and the bell sounded more sharply than usual. No, she had not seen this person before. Here was no frivolous young lieutenant, nor one of the maturer officers, who were on their dignity till the first shy smile told them how far they might go. Here was a piercing falcon eye, set in a circle of crow's-feet, an aquiline high-bred nose, prominent cheek-bones with a fixed red colour; a small hard firmly closed mouth, which smiled with cynical benevolence under a bristling moustache, a chin--highly polished from shaving--retreating in two baggy folds behind a high military collar.
She saw these details with a heart throbbing so violently that she had to lean against a bookcase for support.
"This must be what I have been feeling so frightened about," she said to herself. "This is the dreadful old colonel."
He raised his hand to his cap in careless salute without taking it off.
"Colonel von Mertzbach," he said in a voice the harsh sound of which suggested unlimited authority and power. "I must speak to you for a few minutes, my Fräulein. There are reasons that compel me to make your acquaintance."
Lilly felt that she was to be subjected to a humiliating cross-examination, which she was not in the least bound to tolerate. But never in her life had she seemed to herself so utterly defenceless as at this moment. She was standing before a judge who had taken on himself the right to pardon or condemn her according to his pleasure.
She murmured something like consent with trembling lips.
"You appear to be a most dangerous young woman," he said. "You have turned the heads of all my staff; that is to say, the juniors among them. They are simply crazy about you."
"I don't understand your meaning," answered Lilly, gathering courage as well as she could.
"Humph!" he ejaculated, and glued his eyeglass into his eye, to look her up and down as far as the point where her figure was cut in two by the counter. "Humph!" he repeated. Then he continued: "In these cases it is easy enough to play the innocent. Nevertheless, I can fully sympathise with my young men. In their place I should probably have done the same. But it looks, Fräulein, as if, in spite of your youth and inexperience, you have a fair share of feminine wiles at your command, otherwise you would scarcely have drawn these somewhat fastidious young men here so often with that immaculately reserved manner of yours; but, after all, perhaps it's the manner that's done it."