"She looks badly," replies Count Pistasch's distinguished husky voice.
"She has grown old, fearfully old; she looks as if she were forty," asserts the Klette.
"Ah, bah! She looks rather like a consumptive pensioner," replies Pistasch. "What can be the matter with her? I hope no trouble is worrying her."
"Don't you think that this good Garzin is a little too fond of his pretty sister-in-law?"
"Nonsense, Caroline!" says Pistasch, reprovingly. "You are always imagining something. Recently you asked me whether poor Rudi----"
"Well, that is evidently over;" the Klette heaves a sigh of disappointment; "but she must coquet, poor Mrs. Lanzberg, to amuse herself, there is not much else for her to do; and say yourself--I do not assert that the good Garzin has already knelt to her, but would it not be natural? It would really serve this arrogant Elsa right. To force Garzin, a man of such a gay, sociable nature, to absolute solitude; to take away from him his career, his occupation, in short, everything."
Elsa springs up; she listens breathlessly. What does she care that it is ill-bred to listen? But the voices die away. Pistasch and the Klette turn into another path without noticing the white form in the dark elder niche.
Scirocco at length comes back.
"I could not find either your things or Mimi's maid all this time," he excuses himself for his long delay. "I hope this belongs to you," offering her a white crêpe shawl.
She takes it, but immediately starts back with a violent gesture. "That belongs to my sister-in-law," she cries; "my things are never so strongly perfumed. Only smell it, how strange!"