"I could not resolve to dress; to appear at dinner in a peignoir is a fault which is pardoned in convalescents, and after twenty-four hours of railway travel, I feel at least like a convalescent. Ah, how pretty it is here!"
So cried Linda, entering the drawing-room where Felix and Elsa awaited her, a half hour later.
What she called a peignoir was a confusion of yellowish lace and India muslin with elbow sleeves and the unavoidable Watteau plait in the back.
Her soft hair hung loose over her shoulders.
"I have a headache, and cannot bear a comb, and as we are entre nous----" she excused herself smilingly at Elsa's astonished glance, as she pushed back the heavy waves from temples and neck. Her gestures were full of seductive grace, and her whole form was pervaded with a moist, sweet perfume which reminded one of a summer morning after a storm, and which exhales from a woman who has just taken a perfumed bath. In her whole appearance lay something which excited Elsa's nerves without her being able to explain it--which wounded her feelings of delicacy.
Linda suspected nothing of the impression which she made. "It is pretty here," she repeated, with a lazy glance of satisfaction around the room--"I thank you so much, Elsa! One sees everywhere that a woman's tact has superintended the furnishing--a workman never produces such an impression. Everything looks so cosey, so irregular. How happy I am to be home at last!" and Linda took her sister-in-law's slender, sallow hand in her white, rosy-tipped one, and kissed it with childish exaggeration.
"Who is already here besides the Deys?" she asked then. "Before next week I must really think of paying calls."
Elsa was spared an answer by the quick rolling of a carriage. Springing up she cried--whether her emotion betrayed merely a severe feeling of propriety, and did not also display an unconscious premonition of jealousy I cannot say--"Linda, it is Erwin who has come for me. Put up your hair; it would be unpleasant for you to meet a strange man so!"
With a peculiar expression in glance and smile, Linda fulfilled her sister-in-law's wish. Elsa quickly helped her to twist up her hair, and thereby breathed the peculiar perfume which Baroness Lanzberg used.
She will think of this perfume in many terrible hours which fate has in store for her.