Adjoining the dining-room on the right was the bedroom with strawberry-colored cretonne drapery, old rose enamelled furniture, and a broad, canopied bed with a puffy silk counterpane and curtains held together by a dull gold seven-pointed coronet.
"Does your customer belong to the nobility?" asked Lilly, seized by a vague feeling of envy.
"Not that I know of. Her husband isn't a nobleman. But maybe she herself is of noble extraction."
Lilly heaved a little sigh, recalling her ivory toilet articles and her underwear embroidered with a coronet lying in Mrs. Laue's musty drawers. How well they would suit a place like this! She rapturously breathed in the delicate lilac perfume which penetrated the entire room like the aroma of an aristocratic spring, and shuddered as she compared it with the poor-people's odour that was invading her Dresden treasures with deadly certainty, no matter how persistently she aired them.
It struck Lilly as peculiar that no traces were to be seen of the life and activity of the mistress of the place, not a silk ribbon, no matinée, or nightgown, not a bit of underwear.
"She probably locked everything away, or took everything with her," said Mr. Dehnicke.
They returned to the dining-room, and through the other door on the left entered a small drawing-room at the corner of the house. It was flooded with sunlight.
She looked at the delicate old rose carpet with a pattern of vaguely outlined vines, at the dear little crystal chandelier, whose prisms radiated all the colours of the rainbow, at the dark reddish mahogany furniture with bronze statuettes on the dainty tables--a woman about to dive into water with outstretched arms, a reaper folding his hands in prayer at the sound of the Angelus, and similar subjects. There was a little bookcase, a lady's secrétaire, paintings on the walls, and even an upright piano.
"A piano!" sighed Lilly closing her eyes in mournful bliss.
There were animate objects, too. In front of one of the three windows stood an aquarium with a broad-leaved palm rising over it, and the sunlight gleaming on the water and the gold fish. A canary bird chirped at them from another window.
Lilly recalled her light blue realm. In comparison how plain and compact all this was--like a bird's nest--yet how inconceivably charming when contrasted with the horror she now dwelt in.