"Disgusting!" mutters Lord Langley. "Do you know who it was?" he asks, turning to the Countess Anna. "Lozoncyi, the young artist who created such a sensation a couple of years ago. She was his mistress. I remember her in Rome."
Although upon Erika's account the words are spoken in an undertone, she hears them, and the blood rushes to her cheeks.
And now 'Parsifal' is over, the second act, with its fluttering flower-girl scene, in rather frivolous contrast with the serious motive of the work, its crude inharmonious decorations, and its wonderful dramatic finale; the third act too is over, with its sadly-sweet sunrise melody, its Good Friday spell resolving itself into the angelic music of the spheres.
With the hovering harp-arpeggio of the final scene still thrilling in their souls, Erika and her grandmother with Lord Langley drive back to town, leaving behind them the melancholy rustle of the forest, and hearing around them the rolling of wheels, the cracking of whips, and the footsteps of hundreds of pedestrians.
Life throbs in Erika's veins more warmly than it is wont to do; she is filled with a vague foreboding unknown to her hitherto. She seems to herself to be confronting the solution of a great secret, beside which she has pursued her thoughtless way, and around which the entire world circles.
At the door of their lodgings Lord Langley takes his leave of the ladies: with a lover's tenderness he slips down the glove from his betrothed's white wrist and imprints upon it two ardent kisses, as he whispers, "I trust that my charming Erika will be in a more gracious mood to morrow."
The disagreeable sensation caused by his warm breath upon her cheek was persistent; she could not rid herself of it.
She sent away her maid, and whilst she was undressing took from her pocket the packet of letters which Goswyn had left with her. She had carried it with her all day long, without finding a moment in which to destroy the papers. Now she removed their outside envelope, merely to assure herself that they were her mother's letters. Yes, she recognized the handwriting,--not the strong, almost masculine characters which had distinguished her mother's writing in the latter years of her life, but the long, slanting, faded hand which Erika could remember in the old exercise-books of her school-days. Nothing could have tempted the girl to read these letters: she kissed the poor yellow sheets twice, sadly and reverentially, and then she held them one by one in the flame of her candle.
Her heart was very heavy; a yearning for tenderness, for sympathy, possessed her, and she felt sore and discouraged. The wailing music, the shuddering alluring strains of sinful worldly desire, still haunted her soul with the glance of the stranger who seemed to her no stranger.
She felt a choking sensation at the thought of his companion. Never before had she come in contact with anything of the kind.