"I was going to Glockenstein, to take the 'Maître de Forges' to the grass-widow; she asked me for it yesterday; but if you wish, Katrine, I will stay at home."
"If I wish," Katrine coldly repeats. "Since when have I attempted to interfere in any way with your innocent amusements?"
"I only thought----you have sometimes seemed to me a little jealous of the grass-widow."
Rohritz could have boxed his friend's ears for his want of tact. Katrine's aristocratic features take on an indescribably haughty and contemptuous expression.
"Jealous?--I?" she rejoins, with cutting severity, adding, with a shrug, "on the contrary, I am glad to have another woman relieve me of the trouble of entertaining you."
Tame submission to such words from his wife, and before a witness, is not the part of a hot-blooded soldier like Jack Leskjewitsch.
"Adieu, Rohritz!" he says, and, with a low bow to his wife, he leaves the room.
For an instant Katrine seems about to run after him and bring him back. She takes one step towards the door, then pauses undecided. The sharp, shrill sound of sleigh-hells rises from without through the wintry silence: the sleigh has driven off. Katrine goes to the window to look after it. With lightning speed it glides along, the centre of a bluish, sparkling cloud of snow-particles whirled aloft by the trampling horses. It is out of sight almost immediately.
Her head bent, Katrine turns from the window, and leaves the room with lagging steps.