Felix turned, discovered an old friend, who, many years younger, had served a degree lower in the same regiment with him at that time.
Now the friend was attaché at the embassy, and a favorite with the Parisian ladies, a gay, hot-blooded comrade for whom some one had found the nickname, "Scirocco." "How are you, Felix?" he cried a second time, offering his former comrade his hand.
Felix started. No one in all Austria knew his story better than this very Scirocco, and Scirocco offered him his hand.
"Thank you, Rudi," he murmured softly. "It is very good in you to still remember me."
Poor Scirocco grew very hot and uncomfortable. Lovable and impulsive, he had spoken to Felix without thinking for a moment how hard it is to associate with "such a man." Felix looked so miserable, so depressed that Scirocco would have told all the lies which might occur to him to talk him out of his sadness.
"I was going to run after you in the Bois the other day," he went on, "but you were walking with your wife, and I did not wish to intrude. Sapristi! How long have you been married? Here in foreign parts one loses all Austrian news. Your wife is a sensational beauty. Do not take it amiss that I do not even know who she is. I absolutely do not remember to have seen any one who could remind me of this fairy-like apparition a few years ago in short clothes."
"You certainly never knew her," replied Felix. "She is the daughter of a Viennese manufacturer--Harfink."
"Ah!" Somewhat robbed of his self-possession Scirocco, hastily leading the conversation from an unpleasant subject, stumbles upon yet more dangerous topics. "Do you live in jealous honeymoon solitude, do you not go out at all?"
Felix looks pleadingly at him. "You know that I cannot go out," he murmurs.
And Scirocco hurries over that--he will not understand. "Nonsense!" he cries. "People are wiser here than with us at home. Mind and beauty count for as much as nobility." Poor Scirocco, he was never guilty of a more trivial platitude. "You must take your wife to the X's," he continued.