Nevertheless it happened that one day while she was walking along the street on her husband's arm a look pierced to her heart.
It came from a pair of dark eyes, which from afar had been turned on her in a friendly, searching manner. On coming nearer they flared up, as with a flash of recognition, into a sad fire.
She felt as if she would have to hurry after the passerby and ask:
"Who are you? Do you belong to me? Do you wish me to belong to you?"
She was incautious enough to turn around and look back at him.
But the incident had not escaped her husband. When she faced about again, she saw his vigilant eyes resting upon her in distrust.
And he nodded several times as if to say:
"Aha! That's the point we've gotten to already, is it?"
He remained absorbed and ill-tempered the rest of the day.
That encounter was only the first of an endless series for Lilly.
To be sure, she never met the same young man again, despite her diligent watch for him; but a host of others took his place.
Passersby no longer remained mere figures in a dissolving view, through whom one looked as if they were non-existent. When she saw a slim man at a distance whose contour and bearing appeared youthful she wondered while waiting for him to draw near:
"What will he be like? Will he look at me?"
If he found favour in her eyes, and if his glance was not impudent, yet was full of astonishment or desire, she would often feel a pang, which said to her:
"You suit him far better than this old man at whose side you are walking."
It saddened her also if one she was pleased with happened to pay no attention to her.
"I'm not good enough for him," she would think. "He scorns me. I wonder why he scorns me."
In the dining room, on the Brühlsche Terrasse, and at other elegant places where there is a constant crossfire of furtive glances, her bearing in its relation to her environment began gradually to change. She acknowledged the incense offered her by a little grateful uplift of her eyes, and she looked without embarrassment directly into the faces of the scrutinising ladies; and although she had the keen vision of a falcon, she would gladly have turned a lorgnette on them. But of this she did not venture to breathe a word to the colonel.