She looked at him with her big black eyes, then said quickly and lightly in her broken voice: “Yes, to a certain extent….”
He ventured on the question: “I hope you are pleased with Schloss Delphinenort?”
To which she answered with a pout: “Oh, why not? It's quite a convenient house….”
“Do you like being there better than at New York?” he asked. And she answered:
“Just as much. It's much the same. Much the same everywhere.”
That was all. Klaus Heinrich, and one pace behind him Herr von Braunbart, stood with their hands to their helmets as the chauffeur slipped his gear in and the motor car shivered and started.
It may be imagined that this meeting did not long remain the private property of the Dorothea Hospital; on the contrary, it was the general topic of conversation before the day was out. The Courier published, under a sentimental poetical heading, a detailed description of the rencontre, which, without too violent a departure from the exact truth, yet succeeded in making such a powerful impression on the public mind, and evoked symptoms of such lively interest, that the vigilant newspaper was induced to keep a watchful eye for the future on any further rapprochements between the Spoelmann and Grimmburg houses. It could not report much.
It remarked a couple of times that his Royal Highness Prince Klaus Heinrich, when walking through the promenade after a performance at the Court Theatre, had stopped for a moment at the Spoelmanns' box to greet the ladies. And in its report of the fancy-dress charity bazaar, which took place in the middle of January in the Town Hall—a smart function, in which Miss Spoelmann, at the urgent request of the Committee, acted as seller—no small space was devoted to describing how Prince Klaus Heinrich, when the Court was making a round of the bazaar, had stopped before Miss Spoelmann's stall, how he had bought a piece or two of fancy glass (for Miss Spoelmann was selling porcelain and glass), and had lingered a good eight or ten minutes at her stall. It said nothing about the topic of the conversation. And yet it had not been without importance.
The Court (with the exception of Albrecht) had appeared in the Town Hall about noon. When Klaus Heinrich, with his newly bought pieces of glass in tissue paper on his knee, drove back to the “Hermitage,” he had announced his intention of visiting Delphinenort and inspecting the Schloss in its renovated state, on the same occasion viewing Mr. Spoelmann's collection of glass. For three or four old pieces of glass had been included in Miss Spoelmann's stock which her father himself had given to the bazaar out of his collection, and one of them Klaus Heinrich had bought.
He saw himself again in a semicircle of people, stared at, alone, in front of Miss Spoelmann, and separated from her by the stall-counter, with its vases, jugs, its white and coloured groups of porcelain. He saw her in her red fancy dress, which, made in one piece, clung close to her neat though childish figure, while it exposed dark shoulders and arms, which were round and firm and yet like those of a child just by the wrist. He saw the gold ornament, half garland and half diadem, in the jet of her billowy hair, that showed a tendency to fall in smooth wisps on her forehead, her big, black, inquiring eyes in the pearly-white face, her full and tender mouth, pouting with habitual scorn when she spoke—and round about her in the great vaulted hall had been the scent of firs and a babel of noise, music, the clash of gongs, laughter, and the cries of sellers.