"Stella, you are frivolous to a degree----"
Stella blushes crimson; her eyes fill with tears; she makes awkward little motions with her hands upon the keys, and plays a couple of bars from Thalberg's Étude in Cis-moll.
"Frivolous?--frivolous? But, Anastasia, I was only jesting," she murmurs, and, turning to Rohritz as if for protection, she adds, "It needed very little logic to guess that, for if you had been in love with a young girl there would have been no need for you to be unhappy and to go sailing about on tropical seas to distract your mind: you could simply have married her."
"But suppose the young girl would not have him?" the captain asks, merrily.
Stella looks first at Rohritz, then at her uncle, and murmurs, "That never occurred to me."
A burst of laughter from the captain--laughter in which Katrine joins heartily and Stasy ironically--is the reply to this confession.
"Acknowledge the compliment, Rohritz; come, acknowledge it," Leskjewitsch exclaims in the midst of his laughter.
But Rohritz maintains unmoved his serious, kindly expression of countenance.
"It is not given to even the greatest minds to contemplate all possible contingencies," he says, dryly.
The Baroness Meineck, absorbed in her game, has heard little, meanwhile, of what has been going on about her; she now suddenly remembers that it is incumbent upon her to attend to her daughter's training.