Dinner is over, and the gilt chandelier in the garden-room, where coffee is usually served, is lighted. Selina is sitting at the piano accompanying Fainacky, who is singing. Paula is in her own rooms with her mother, inspecting the latest additions to her trousseau, just arrived from Vienna. Lato has remained in the garden-room, where he endures with heroic courage the sound of Fainacky's voice as he whines forth his sentimental French songs, accentuating them in the most touching places with dramatic gestures and much maltreatment of his pocket-handkerchief. After each song he compliments Selina upon her playing. Her touch reminds him of Madame Essipoff. Selina, whose digestion is perfect so far as flattery is concerned, swallows all his compliments and looks at him as if she wished for more.
On the wide gravel path, before the glass doors of the room, Olga is pacing to and fro. The broad light from door and window reveals clearly the upper portion of her figure. Her head is slightly bent, her hands are clasped easily before her. There is a peculiar gliding grace in all her movements. With all Treurenberg's efforts to become interested in the newspaper which he holds, he cannot grasp the meaning of a single sentence. The letters flicker before his eyes like a crowd of crawling insects. Weary of such fruitless exertion, he lifts his eyes, to encounter Olga's gazing at him with a look of tenderest sympathy. He starts, and makes a fresh effort to absorb himself in the paper, but before he is aware of it she has come in from the garden and has taken her seat on a low chair beside him.
"Is anything the matter with you?" she asks.
"What could be the matter with me?" he rejoins, evasively.
"I thought you might have a headache, you look so pale," she says, with a matronly air.
"Olga, I would seriously advise you to devote yourself to the study of medicine, you are so quick to observe symptoms of illness in those about you."
She returns his sarcasm with a playful little tap upon his arm.
Fainacky turns and looks at them, a fiendish light in his green eyes, in the midst of his most effective rendering of Massenet's "Nuits d'Espagne."
"If you want to talk, I think you might go out in the garden, instead of disturbing us here," Selina calls out, sharply.
Lato instantly turns to his newspaper, and when he looks up from it again, Olga has vanished. He rises and goes to the open door. The sultry magic of the September night broods over the garden outside. The moon is not yet visible,--it rises late,--but countless stars twinkle in the blue-black heavens, shedding a pale silvery lustre upon the dark earth. Olga is nowhere to be seen; but there---- He takes a step or two forward; she is walking quickly. He pauses, looks after her until she disappears entirely among the shrubbery, and then he goes back to the garden-room.