“Why queer?” asked Elsa von Kreuzenach. “I am a little excited, too.”
She made a half-curtsey, like an early Victorian girl; and then closed his door, and Brand was sorry, as he told me quite frankly, that he was left alone.
“The girl’s a pretty piece of Dresden china,” he said.
When I chaffed him with a “Take care, old lad!” he only growled and muttered, “Oh, to hell with that! I suppose I can admire a pretty thing, even if it’s made in Germany?”
Brand told me that he met Elsa’s father and brother on the third evening that he slept in the Kreuzenachs’ house. When he arrived that evening at about five o’clock, the maid-servant, Truda, who “did” his bedroom and dusted his sitting-room with a German passion for cleanliness and with many conversational advances, informed him with a look of mysterious importance that the “Old Man” wanted to see him in the drawing-room.
“What old man?” asked Brand, at which Truda giggled and said, “The old Herr Baron.”
“He hates the English like ten thousand devils,” added Truda confidentially.
“Perhaps I had better not go then,” was Brand’s answer.
Truda told him that he would have to go. When the old Herr Baron asked for a thing it had to be given him. The only person who dared to disobey him was Frâulein Elsa, who was very brave and a “hubsches Madchen.”
Brand braced himself for the interview, but felt extremely nervous when Truda rapped at the drawingroom door, opened it, and announced in German: “The English officer!”