“Why are we talking of this?” asked the old woman peevishly, “when we have been silent so long?”
“I do not know. Get on with your embroidery.”
“Der Herr Jesus! Why should I finish this work? Who will wear it?”
“Talk, then, talk,” said Sophia Dorothea. “Something is different to-night.”
“It is the rain,” nodded the old woman. Her monstrous shadow wavered behind her like a giant impotently threatening.
“It is memory,” answered the Princess. She relaxed in her chair. Her arms, still lovely but colourless as the limbs of the dead, showed where the wide sleeves of dull blue fell apart, and her hands, almost inhumanly slender, clasped the polished knobs of the chair-arms. “Was I beautiful–that night?” she said. “I scarcely knew it.”
Annette von Arlestein looked at the ruined face, pale beneath the grey locks, the thin bare throat, the sunk dark eyes, the lined mouth. “I can hardly recall what you were,” she muttered; “I can hardly think you are the same.”
A veil seemed to drop over her eyes; she too was remembering.
“Annette,” said the Princess, “do you think he has been just to me?”
“It is so long ago,” whispered the Countess.