The noon meal was sufficiently uncomfortable. Count Hamilcar and the professor did to be sure talk eagerly on remote subjects, as if nothing had happened, but Countess Betty smiled but absent-mindedly and thought of other matters. The only sensation was that Lisa had not appeared in black today, but was wearing a mallow-colored muslin dress with old-rose ribbons. Boris, very pale, conversed with her as formally as if he had just met her.
"Reception at the Queen of Poland's," Bob whispered to Erika. The two children were unbearable today and had to be called to order again and again. Billy's chair remained empty. She was lying half undressed on the bed in her room upstairs, her disheveled hair falling into her hot face, and she was very impatient with Marion. Again and again Marion had to repeat what Boris had said. "I want to know it absolutely word for word and you don't tell me that way."
"Yes, I do," asseverated Marion, "it was like this: 'Tell Billy that it is better for us not to see each other again today, and we won't take leave of each other, either; she must wait, she will have word of me, and then my fate and hers will rest entirely in her hands.'"
"He certainly didn't say 'fate,' that isn't his style at all," complained Billy, "and then decide--what shall I decide, oh dear, it's terrible. And you say Lisa had on her light-colored muslin today, what for? and of course Boris is furious because papa insulted him." She flung herself back and forth as in a fever. "Do pull down the shades, this afternoon sun is sad enough to make you die; and you have an expression on your face as if you knew something that I don't know. Say it, then."
"But I don't know anything," averred Marion whimpering.
"Bah, then go, I don't want to see anybody. Bob can come, but he's the only one; he can be as naughty as he likes here--that will cheer me up."
But when Bob came he was not naughty, but embarrassed. Billy in her excitement was strange and uncanny to him. So Billy sent him away too.
"Go, you're a stupid, tiresome boy."
Bob went, but in the doorway he turned around aggrieved, and remarked, "I don't understand unhappy love at all."
Now Billy lay there and listened to the sounds that went through the rooms below her, the voices and the slamming of doors, and she waited. That was her business now. For he had said so, poor injured, insulted Boris. When she thought of the wrong that had been done him, her heart swelled with impatient desire to do something for him, to show him and the world in general that she was for him, and him alone. The summer afternoon droned at the windows, the house grew quiet, and Billy felt as if in this sleepy hour she were quite alone with her excitement in a world that would not hear of excitement or of events. So she too kept still, her eyes raised to the ceiling. It seemed as if she had lain there an endless time before the sound came at last, the sound for which she had waited. She sat up. The rumbling of a carriage which stopped in the courtyard below, voices, the banging of doors, and again the rumble of the carriage, which grew fainter and fainter, and finally slowly died away. "He is gone," she groaned, and sank back upon her pillows. Great tears rolled down her cheeks, but an inward tension had relaxed. Some one whom we love is riding away and we weep: that is at least comprehensible, and so she cried herself to sleep.