"Very becoming," her step-mother kindly assured her.
"Oho!" said Truyn banteringly, "our Ella is beginning to be vain."
Whereupon Gabrielle blushed deeply and to hide her confusion went to the piano and began to strum "Annette and Lubin." She did not play well but her hands looked very pretty running over the keys.
"I am surprised that Ossi does not make his appearance," said Truyn, laying aside his Figaro. Like all Austrians residing in Paris he had a special preference for that frivolous journal. "I met him this afternoon on the Boulevard, and he asked me expressly whether we were to be at home this evening."
Gabrielle looked, as her father observed with surprise, rather embarrassed. He had spoken thoughtlessly, and in masculine ignorance of the state of affairs. He was just beginning to teaze the girl about her behaviour when the footman announced the Baroness Melkweyser.
Her head-dress of red feathers sat somewhat askew upon the old-fashioned puffs of hair that framed her sallow face. She wore a gown of flowered brocade, the surpassing ugliness of which showed it to have been purchased at a bargain at some great bazaar as a "fin de saison." She squinted slightly, winked constantly, was entirely out of breath, and sank exhausted into an arm-chair, before uttering a word of greeting.
"Ah, if you only knew all I have done this blessed day!" she exclaimed.
The Truyn trio looked at her in smiling silence.
"Confessed and received the sacrament very early," the baroness began the list of her achievements, "always on the second of every month--I never can manage it on the first--then at the Pierson sale I bought six things marked with Louis Philippe's cipher, then I went to see Ada de Thienne's trousseau,--then to a breakfast at the new minister's--too comical--his wife made herself perfectly ridiculous, in a bare neck at two o'clock in the daytime!"
"That is the inevitable consequence of a change of ministers," Zinka remarked. Her manner of speech, quiet, and rather inclined to irony, was that of those who, with rigid self-control have for years endured with dignity some great grief.