"You have carried out the penance you began on Ash-Wednesday!"
"Perhaps," and he could not help smiling.
She shrugged her shoulders: "I had intended to break off our friendship," she went on, "but now that I see the cause of your faithlessness,"--and she glanced at the handsome young countesses--"I quite understand it. Will you at any rate do me the favor of introducing me to the ladies?"
"Fräulein Sterzl--" said Sempaly; but hardly had he uttered the words when a scarcely suppressed smile curled Polyxena's lip. Zinka saw the smile, and she saw too that Sempaly's manner instantly changed; he put on an artificial expression of intolerable condescension.
Zinka turned very pale, her eyes flashed indignantly as she hastily returned the young Austrians' bow and at once went back to her post. Sterzl, who was talking to Truyn in a recess and saw the little scene from a distance, frowned darkly. Sempaly meanwhile seated himself on a stool by his cousins and with his back to the tea-table where Zinka was busying herself.
"So this is the far-famed Zinka Sterzl!" exclaimed Polyxena: "She does credit to your taste, Nicki. But she allows herself to speak to you in a very extraordinary manner; it is really rather too much!" Sempaly made no reply. "She treats you already as if you were her own property."
"But Xena," said Nini, trying to moderate her sister's irony, "at least do not speak so loud." In a few minutes Mr. Ellis came to announce that Monsieur B. was about to play his 'Arab symphony,' and the company moved back into the drawing-room.
The evening had other treats in store; when Monsieur B. had done his place was taken by a young Belgian count who devoted all his spare time to the composition of funeral marches, who could also play songs and ballads, such as are usually confined to the streets of Florence or the cafés chantants of Paris, arranged for the piano, and who gave a duet between a cock and hen with so much feeling and effect that all the audience applauded heartily, especially the Jatinskys to whom this style of thing was quite a novelty. Then Mrs. Ferguson sang her French couplets, Mr. Ellis played an adagio by Beethoven on the concertina, and then Zinka was asked to sing.
"What am I to sing? You know the extent of my collection," she said with rather forced brightness to Mr. Ellis.
"Oh! a Stornello. We beg for a Stornello," said Siegburg following her to the piano--"vieni maggio, vieni primavera," and Lady Julia seconded the request.