The walls were hung with blue brocade; small gilded chairs, with butterfly-wings for backs, card-tables, tabourets and stools of every description, were dotted about, crouching on the Indian carpet like fabulous beasts. A gigantic fan of snow-white marabou feathers served as a screen for the stove. Bronzes and antique bric-a-brac figures, dainty and alluring, populated the cabinets; a marqueterie bookcase contained the mistress's favourite volumes, bound in ivory-coloured vellum, and an old Venetian altar-cloth was draped in coquettish folds over it as a curtain. Above the writing-table there shone in Carrara marble the dreamy head of the Vatican Eros, outlined with a bluish tinge, for the light penetrated to it through a blue and gold embroidered gauze background, flooding the room one moment with a subdued duskiness, the next with vivid flashes of sunshine.
The whole was an interior commonly enough seen in European capitals, but something quite unheard of here in the remote "Hinterwald."
"He spoils you far too much," he said, with a kind of paternal smile, shaking his finger at her.
"His kindness weighs me to the earth," she replied, pressing her milk-white face against the cushions.
Again he looked at his watch. "Time is up," he said; "we mustn't keep him waiting for nothing."
She lifted her hands in entreaty. "Five minutes more!" she begged.
"Why?"
"I am so afraid."
"Of him?"
She was silent.