She perfectly remembers her at the Giovanelli ball, leaning rather heavily on her partner's arm, her eyes half closed, her head inclined towards his shoulder, and again in a solitary little anteroom before a marble chimney-piece, below which a fire glowed and sparkled, lifting both hands to her head, an attitude that brought into strong relief the magnificent outline of her shoulders and bust. While thus busied with arranging her hair, she smiled over her shoulder at a young man who was leaning back in an arm-chair near, his legs crossed, holding his crush-hat in both hands, regarding her with languid looks of admiration.
This was Stella's friend, black-eyed Prince Zino Capito. All Venice was then talking of the Prince's adoration of the beautiful Livonian.
"What is it about her that makes every man fall in love with her?" Stella asks herself. And a sudden pang of something like envy assails her innocent heart. Ah, she would like just one taste of the wondrous poison of which all the poets sing. "Will any one ever be in love with me?" she asks herself. "Ah, it must be delicious,--delicious as music and the fragrance of flowers in spring; and I should so like to be happy for once in my life, even were it for only a single hour. But----" Her eyes fill with tears: what has she to do with happiness? it is not for her; of that she has been convinced from the moment when on that last melancholy journey with her father she found she had lost her little amulet. Poor papa! he would gladly have bestowed happiness upon her from heaven, and instead he had taken her happiness down with him into the grave. Poor, dear papa!
The breath of the roses outside steals in through the closed blinds, sweet and oppressive. Among the flowers below awakened to fresh beauty, the bees hum loudly, plunging into the honeysuckles, and gently as if with reverence touching the pale refined beauty of the Malmaison roses, while above the acacias and lindens they are swarming.
Rohritz has been occupied in writing his usual quarterly duty-letter to his married brother. As with all men of his stamp, a letter is for him a great undertaking, accomplished wearily from a strict sense of duty.
Seated at the writing-desk of carved rosewood bestowed upon him long since by an aunt and provided with many secret drawers and with all kinds of silver-gilt and ivory utensils of mysterious uselessness, he covers four pages of English writing-paper with his formal, regular handwriting, and then looks for his seal wherewith to seal his epistle. Rummaging in the various drawers and receptacles of the desk, he comes across a small bracelet,--a delicate circlet to which is suspended a crystal locket containing a four-leaved clover.
For a moment he cannot recall how he became possessed of the trifle. Could it have been the gift of some sentimental female friend? In vain he taxes his memory: no, it certainly is no memento of the kind. He swings it to and fro upon his finger, letting the sunshine play upon it, and then first perceives a cipher graven on the crystal, a Roman S, surmounting a star. Involuntarily he murmurs below his breath, "Stella!" and suddenly remembers where he found the bracelet,--on the red velvet seat of a first-class coupé, three years before, towards the end of April.
He had advertised it in the Viennese and Grätz newspapers, doing his best to restore the porte-bonheur to its owner, but in vain.
"In fact----" In an instant he recalls what Leskjewitsch had told him of Stella's sad journey with her father. He smiles, leaves his letter unsealed, goes to the window, looks down, into the garden, sees Stasy busy with her chrysanthemums, hears, proceeding from a garden-tent at a little distance, decorated with red tassels, the contralto tones of the Baroness Meineck and the depressed and weeping replies of her pupil.