Lato turns his head aside.
"Then you will not do me this service?"
"I cannot!" Treurenberg murmurs, faintly.
"I might have known it!" Harry breaks forth, his eyes flashing with indignant scorn. "You are the same old fellow, the very same,--a good fellow enough, yes, sympathetic, compassionate, and, as long as you are allowed to remain perfectly passive, the noblest of men. But as soon as anything is required of you,--if any active interference is called for at your hands, there's an end of it. You simply cannot, you would rather die than rouse yourself to any energetic action!"
"Perhaps so," Lato murmurs, with a far-away look in his eyes, and a smile that makes Harry's blood run cold.
A pause ensues, the longest of the many pauses that have occurred in this tête-à-tête.
The bees seem to buzz louder than ever. A dry, thirsty wind sighs in the boughs of the apple-tree; two or three hard green apples drop to the ground. At last Treurenberg gathers himself up.
"You must take me as I am," he says, wearily; "there is no cutting with a dull knife. I cannot possibly enlighten my mother-in-law as to the true state of your feelings. It would do no good, and it would make an infernal row. But I will give you one piece of good advice----"
Before he is able to finish his sentence his attention is arrested by a perfect babel of sounds from the dining-room. The piano music is hushed, its discord merged into the angry wail of a shrieking feminine voice and the rough, broken, changing tones of a lad,--the rebellious pupil, Vladimir Leskjewitsch. The hurly-burly is so outrageous that every one is roused to investigate it. Countess Zriny rushes in, with short, waddling steps, the paint-brush with which she has been mending St. John's robe still in her hand; Hedwig rushes in; Harry and Lato rush in.
"What is the matter? What is the matter?"