"Prince Oblonsky!" Stella hastily exclaims. "Did you say Oblonsky?"
"Yes; that was her husband's name, Boris Oblonsky. Now she is a widow, and still perfectly beautiful."
"Perfectly beautiful. I saw her in Venice at the Princess Giovanelli's ball," says Stella, "'with brilliant and far-gazing eyes.' So that was she!" And with a slight anxiety she wonders to herself, "A love-affair! What is the real meaning of a love-affair?"
CHAPTER IX.
[FOUND.]
A sleepy afternoon quiet broods over Erlach Court. Anastasia is sitting in the shade of an arbour, embroidering a strip of fine canvas with yellow sunflowers and red chrysanthemums. At a little distance the Baroness Meineck, who has volunteered to superintend Freddy's education during her stay at Erlach Court, is giving the boy a lesson in mathematics, making such stupendous demands upon his seven-year-old capacity that, ambitious and intelligent though the young student be, he is beginning to grow confused with his ineffectual attempts to follow the lofty flight of his teacher's intellect. Stella, with whom mental excitement is always combined with musical thirst, is all alone in the drawing-room, playing from the 'Kreisleriana.' Her fingers glide languidly over the keys. "A love-affair! What is the real meaning of a love-affair?" The question presents itself repeatedly to her mind, and her veins thrill with a mixture of curiosity, desire, and dread. Lacking all intimacy with girls of her own age or older than herself, who might have enlightened her on such points, she has the vaguest ideas as to much that goes on in the world. A love-affair is for her something connected with rope ladders and peril to life, like the interviews of Romeo and Juliet, something that she cannot fancy to herself without moonlight and a balcony. Her innocent curiosity flutters to and fro, spellbound, about the Baden-Baden episode in Rohritz's youth, as a butterfly flutters above a dull pool the pitiful muddiness of which is disguised by brilliant sunshine, the blue reflection of the skies, and a net-work of pale water-lilies.
She could not tear her thoughts from Baden-Baden, which she knew partly from Tourganief's 'Smoke,' partly in its present shorn condition from her own experience,--Baden-Baden, which when the Föhren and Rohritz were together there might have been described as a bit of Paradise rented to the devil.
"I wonder if she called him Edgar when they were alone?" the girl asked herself.
Her heart beat fast. It was as if she had by chance read a page of some forbidden book negligently left lying open. Not for the world would she have turned the leaf to read on, for, in common with every pure, young girl, when she approached the great mystery of love she was possessed by a sacred timidity almost amounting to awe.
"I wonder if he was very unhappy?" she asks herself. "Yes, he must have been;" Katrine had told her that he grew gray with suffering. A great wave of sympathy and pity wells up in her innocent heart. "Yes, she was very beautiful!" she says to herself.