"Remarkable, very!" said Truyn, "We usually have to pay dear for the courtesies of a Capriani and his kind!"
"Have you everything, Ella?" asked Zinka, "shall we start?"
"I should like to have my hand-bag, Hortense has left it with the large luggage."
Meanwhile, with an unpleasant smile and hat in hand, a sallow-faced, grey-haired, elderly man, with the look of a bird of prey, approached the Countess Wjera, and held out his right hand. "I am immensely gratified, your Excellency, after so long a time ....!"
The Countess, her eyes half closed, measured him haughtily. "With whom have I the pleasure ...?"
The Countess silently shrugged her shoulders, and turning half away, called in an irritated tone, "Are we ready to go at last, Ossi?...."
A whirling cloud of dust was soon the only trace left of the bustle of the arrival.
The short drive was spent by Truyn in reminiscences, by the betrothed pair in sentiment.
At the tea, which was awaiting the travellers, and of which the Lodrin's stayed to partake, there was much laughter over the _chic_ of the Caprianis, over their wealth, and--their obtrusiveness. Oswald suddenly grew thoughtful.
"Did you ever before meet these people, mamma?" he asked.
"I never knew any Conte Capriani in my life,--who are these Caprianis?" asked the Countess.
"Nobody knows," said Oswald. "Some say he is a Greek, some that he comes from Marseilles, and others that he is a Turk."
"They are all wrong," Georges said drily, "he comes originally from Bohemia; he was formerly a physician, and his name was Stein."
Rautschin, still Rautschin!--the tiny town lying at the feet of the huge castle on the tower of which the clock has stopped for twenty years--but no longer in pouring rain with thunder and lightning, but Rautschin beneath skies of sapphire blue, upon a hot July afternoon.
The sun was still high in the heavens. The crooked little row of houses on one side of the Market Square, cast short, black shadows, the national red kerchiefs, with broad borders of gay flowers hanging at the door of the principal shop, fluttered gently in the summer breeze. A melancholy hubbub of discords, struggling in vain for a solution, was heard through the open window of one of the newest and ugliest houses. Eugéne Alexander Cibulka, and the wife of the district commissioner, were playing Wagner's 'Walküre,' arranged for four hands, and each had again 'lost the place.' They regularly lose the place every time a leaf is turned, and so the one who gets first to the bottom of the page, very kindly waits for the other.