"What plan?" asked Lilly, utterly bewildered.
Miss von Schwertfeger measured her with a glance of pitying scorn.
"My dear child, I knew everything. I saw it coming from the very first, the moment you met him. I calculated it on my fingers the way I calculate the cost of a meal. I simply let matters drift. I could do so without dishonouring myself. Besides there was no use interfering. You were bent upon your own ruin."
"What have I done to you," Lilly stammered, swallowing her tears, "to make you hate me so? I never wanted to oust you from your position. I subjected myself to you from the very first. I put myself completely into your hands, and now you do this to me."
"If I hated you, you wouldn't be sitting here. You would probably be straying along some country road. I had you in my grasp and could have crushed you at least a dozen times, but didn't. However, I'll tell you the truth. I _did_ hate you, that is, before I knew you. I imagined you a sly, fresh little thing, who held off from the colonel in a pure spirit of calculation, until he adopted the extreme measure to which old libertines resort in such cases. But when I saw you, you dear child, without malice or guile, defenceless, and with the best intentions in the world to love the colonel and me, too, if possible, I had to back down--I and my hate. Then you became nothing else to me than a small, insignificant creature, which one uses so long as it is serviceable, and shoves aside after it has fulfilled its purpose. I am not concerned with you any more. You dropped out of the game long ago, and now the colonel and myself are playing it alone. I'll have to have it out with him, and then my work's done."
Lilly felt nothing but dull, impotent astonishment, as if doors were being opened and curtains drawn aside, and she were looking into men's hearts as into a fiery abyss.
"I thought you were so attached to him," she said. "I thought--"
Suddenly it occurred to her that her first suspicion had not been far from the truth. This hardened, commanding spinster, whose beauty was not yet entirely faded, had found favour in the eyes of her employer some ten or fifteen years before, had then been neglected, and was now taking revenge.