Suddenly she turned her head: a carriage was rolling along Bellevue Street, already deserted at this hour because of the lateness of the season. It stopped before the house. The old lady started, grew visibly paler, and compressed her lips.
The hall door opened; the servants ran down the staircase.
"Good night, Countess!" Goswyn touched the delicate old hand with his lips and hurried away.
On the staircase he encountered a tall slender girl in the most unbecoming mourning attire that he had ever seen a human being wear, and with gloves so much too short that they revealed a pair of slightly-reddened wrists. He touched his cap, and bowed profoundly.
He carried into the street with him an impression in his heart of something pale, slender, immature, pathetic, concealing the germ of great beauty.
He could not forget the distress in the eyes that had looked out from the pale oval face. He recalled the coldly-sneering old woman in the room he had left, with her disdain of all emotion. He knew how she would be repelled by the red wrists and the disfiguring gown. "Poor thing!" he said to himself.
In thoughtful mood he walked along a path in the Thiergarten. All around reigned silence. The sweet vigour of the spring-time was wafted from the soil, from the trees, from every tender soft unfolding leaf. In the gentle light of countless sparkling stars the feathery young foliage gleamed with a ghostly pallor; here and there a lantern shone, a spot of yellow light in the dimness, colouring the grass and leaves about it arsenic-green.
No people were here who had anything to do; only here and there a pair of lovers were strolling in the warm shade of the spring night.
The insistent rhythm of some popular dance interrupted the yearning music of spring which was sighing through the half-open leaves and blossoms. The noise annoyed him, reminding him unpleasantly of the cynicism with which unsuccessful men are wont to vaunt the bitterness of their existence.
He had walked far out of his way, into the midst of the Thiergarten.