"Patience!" echoed Sterzl with an indescribable accent. "Patience!--yes, if I could only hope that things would mend. At first it provoked me that she should let everybody see ... know ... I thought she might have more spirit and self-command. But now.--Good heavens! she does all she can and it is killing her ... that is not her fault. If only she were resentful--but she never complains; she is always content with everything, she never even contradicts my mother now. And then, what is worst of all, I hear her at night--her room is over mine--walking up and down, very softly as if she were afraid of waking anyone--up and down for hours; and often I hear her sobbing--she never sheds a tear by day!..." he sighed. "And then--if it were for a man who was worth it all!" he went on. "But that blue-eyed, boneless, good-for-nothing simpleton!... I ought never to have allowed her to step out of her own sphere--I ought never to have allowed them to become intimate! I knew he was not worthy of her, even when, as I believed--but you will laugh at my simplicity perhaps--he condescended to be in earnest.--You cannot imagine what it is now to have to meet him every day,--to hear him ask every day: 'how are you all at home?'--I feel ready to choke ... I could crush him under foot like a worm!... and I am bound to be civil. I may not even tell him that he has insulted me."
The baroness here came back.
"Lovely!" she exclaimed, with her affected giggle, "quite perfect! Zinka has never had a dress that suited her so well."
"That is well!" said Sterzl vaguely, "where is she?"
"She is gone to lie down; she has a bad headache," minced the baroness. "The young girls of the present day have no stamina. Why, at her age I...."
The general was not in the mood to listen to her sentimental reminiscences and he took his leave. In the hall he once more wrung Cecil's hand: "Fortune has favored you," he said; "you have a splendid career before you, and in her new and pleasant home Zinka will forget.--I congratulate you on your new start in life."
Aye--his new start in life!
CHAPTER II.
The Brancaleone Palace, on the slope of the Quirinal, is one of the finest in Rome, and particularly famous for its gardens, laid out in terraces down the side of the hill, with the lower rooms of the palazzo opening on to the uppermost level. The dancing was in a large, almost square, room adjoining a long vaulted corridor full of old pictures relieved here and there by the cold severity of an antique marble statue. It was lighted by marvellous chandeliers of Venetian glass that hung from the ceiling. At the end of the corridor two steps led down into an anteroom, dividing it from a smaller sanctuary where the gems of the Brancaleone collection were displayed--mixed up, unfortunately, with several modern monstrosities--and from this room a door opened into the garden.
Zinka arrived late. A transient and feverish expectancy lent her pinched features the brilliancy they had lost while her timid reserve gave her even more charm than her former innocent self-confidence, and her dress was certainly wonderfully becoming. Nor had she lost all her old popularity, for she was soon surrounded by a little crowd of Roman 'swells;' one or two even of the Jatinskas' admirers deserted to Zinka.