With a shudder Stella put back these relics of a dead love in their little coffin. It was as if she had heard a corpse speak.
Since then she has often wished to burn the letters, out of affectionate reverence for the dead who held them sacred, but she has never summoned up sufficient courage to ask her mother's permission.
The little shirt is finished; with a sigh Stella folds it together, and is just wondering what she shall do next to occupy the rest of the afternoon, when the Baroness says,--
"Have you nothing to do, Stella?"
"No, mamma."
"Well, then, you can run over to Schwarz's and buy me a couple of quires of paper; my supply is exhausted, and I will, meanwhile, have tea brought up."
Donning her hat and gloves, Stella sets forth. Herr Schwarz is the only shopkeeper in the village, and his shop contains a more heterogeneous collection of articles than the biggest shop in Paris. He often boasts that he has everything for sale, from poison for rats, and dynamite bombs, to paper collars and scented soap. His shop is at the other end of the village from the mill, and to reach it Stella must pass the most ornate of the villas.
Most of the summer residents have left Zalow; only a few special enthusiasts for country air have been induced by the exceptionally fine autumn weather to prolong their stay. In the garden of the tailor who built himself a hunting-lodge in the style of Francis the First a group of people are disputing around a croquet-hoop in the centre of a very small lawn, and in the Giroflé Villa some one is practising Schumann's 'Études symphoniques' with frantic ardour. Stella smiles; the last sound that fell upon her ears before she went to Erlach Court with her mother was the 'Études symphoniques,' the first that greeted her upon her return in the middle of August was the 'Études symphoniques.' She knows precisely who is so persistently given over to these rhapsodies,--an odd creature, a woman named Fuhrwesen, who has been a teacher of the piano for some years in Russia, and who, now over forty, still hopes for a career as an artist.
Stella's little commission is soon attended to. As she hands her mother the paper on her return, their only servant, a barefooted girl from the village, with a red-and-black checked kerchief tied about her head, brings the tea into the room.
"A letter has come for you," the Baroness says to her daughter,--"a letter from Grätz. I do not know the hand. Who can be writing to you from Grätz? Where did I put it?"