When Billy awoke, the room was ruddy with the evening light, voices came up from the garden, she heard the twins laughing, and on the porch her father was delivering a lecture for the professor's benefit. A fresh uneasiness about life came over Billy, and she got up to look out of the window. Yes, there was Lisa walking along in her bright muslin dress and eagerly haranguing the lieutenant, who walked a little stiff- legged beside her. Poor thing, thought Billy, she wants her love affair too. But Billy felt as if there were but one love affair in the world and that one her own: all the rest was simply bungling. Discontentedly she returned to her bed; she could not join the others down there yet. Where could Marion be!
When Marion came, she had to tell her story. How did he look as he rode away? How did he take leave of father? Of course Marion had not seen the things that really counted, but she brought a message. "But absolutely word for word, please," Billy admonished her.
"Yes, certainly, this is what he said," reported Marion: "Come tomorrow at noon to the linden that stands outside the fence at the end of the park. There Billy shall have news. Tell Billy that she alone has the decision."
"Oh, dear," wailed Billy, "this horrible decision again! What does he mean? What will be at the linden?"
And the two girls sat together and whispered about this mystery; they could not stop talking about it. In the room it grew dusky, and the mystery became steadily more threatening. Billy could endure it no longer and sent Marion away:
"Go, you keep saying the same thing. Send old Lohmann to me. She's the only one of you I can stand. Have her tell her old stories."
"Lohmann came with her little yellow face under the black cap, and the hands contracted with gout. She was an old nurse-maid, who was now spending her old age in a small chamber in the basement, by sitting at the window behind her geraniums, and eating the bread of charity. The old woman cowered down at Billy's bed and began in a lamenting voice,
"Yes, our little countess is having a hard time, everybody has a hard time, there's nothing else for it;" but Billy interrupted her irritably: "But Lohmann, is that what I sent for you for. Tell your old stories, can't you, I can pity myself."
And Lohmann recounted the stories she had told so often, how as a tiny girl she had taken milk and cheese to town with her mother, very early in the gray morning light. In winter it was very cold and they would warm themselves in a little tavern; other market women would be sitting there too, wrapped in heavy shawls like big balls of gray, and little Lohmann was given Warmbier, that was hot beer with milk and sugar. Billy saw all that, it was what she wanted to see, the little tavern full of those balls of gray; it smelled of damp wool and an overheated stove, and outside the windows was the blue cold twilight of the winter morning. That was sad and peaceful, and far, far removed from all puzzling decisions.
"I say, Lohmann," and Billy started up, "Warmbier would be the only thing I could take now; go and make me some."