The door just now opens and Zinka and Sempaly come in; she calm and sweet, he dark and scowling.
"Thank God!" cries Truyn.
"What in the world has happened?" asks the princess, while Truyn draws a chair to the table for Zinka, next to himself. "What has happened?" repeated Sempaly. "The most obvious thing in the world. We got into the thick of the mob and could not get through."
"I cannot understand how that should have occurred," says Madame de Gandry. "We all came through."
"You may perhaps recollect that we were the last of the party, countess; we had hardly gone twenty yards when the crowd had become a compact mass, we pressed on, determined to get through at any cost--alone I could have managed it--but with a lady--suddenly we were in the thick of a furious squabble--curses, blows, and knives. I cannot tell you how miserable I was at finding myself out in the street with a lady--a young girl...."
"Fräulein Sterzl seems to take it all much more coolly than you do. Count Sempaly," interposes Madame de Gandry spitefully; "she does not appear to have been at all terrified by the adventure."
"Fräulein Zinka was very brave," replied Sempaly.
"Goodness me! what was there to be afraid of;" says Zinka with the simplicity of childish innocence. "The responsibility was Count Sempaly's not mine."
The French woman laughs sharply. "We must be moving now," she says, "if we mean to go to Costanzi's," and there is a clatter of chairs and a little scene of confusion in which no one can find the right shawl or wrap for each lady.
But Princess Vulpini makes no attempt to move: "I am going nowhere else this evening," she says with unwonted determination. "I will not take Zinka to Constanzi's. I will wait till she has eaten her beef-steak and then I will take her home. I hope you will all enjoy yourselves."