ing
interest in the affairs of that specious hypocrite Lohm. "Come
unexpectedly," she wrote; "it will be better to take her by surprise;
and above all things come at once."

She gave the letter herself to the postman, and then, having nothing to
do but needlework that need not be done, and feeling out of sorts after
the long night's watch, and uneasy about Axel Lohm's evident attraction
for Anna, she went into the drawing-room and spent the morning
elaborately differing from the baroness.

They differed often; it could hardly be called quarrelling, but there
was a continual fire kept up between them of remarks that did not make
for peace. Over their needlework they addressed those observations to
each other that were most calculated to annoy. Frau von Treumann would
boast of her ancestral home at Kadenstein, its magnificence, and the
style in which, with a superb disregard for expense, her brother kept it
up, well knowing that the baroness had had no home more ancestral than a
flat in a provincial town; and the baroness would retort by relating, as
an instance of the grievous slanderousness of so-called friends, a
palpably malicious story she had heard of manure heaps before the
ancestral door, and of unprevented poultry in the _Schloss_ itself.
Once, stirred beyond the bounds of prudence enjoined by Karlchen, Frau
von Treumann had begun to sympathise with the Elmreich family's
misfortune in including a member like Lolli; but had been so much
frightened by her victim's immediate and dreadful pallor that she had
turned it off, deciding to leave the revelation of her full knowledge of
Lolli to Karlchen.

The only occasions on which they agreed were when together they attacked
Fraeulein Kuhraeuber; and more than once already that hapless young woman
had gone away to cry. Anna's thoughts had been filled lately by other
things, and she had not paid much attention to what was being talked
about; but yet it seemed to her that Frau von Treumann and the baroness
had discovered a subject on which Fraeulein Kuhraeuber was abnormally
sensitive and secretive, and that again and again when they were tired
of sparring together they returned to this subject, always in amiable
tones and with pleasant looks, and always reducing the poor Fraeulein to
a pitiable state of confusion; which state being reached, and she gone
out to hide her misery in her bedroom, they would look at each other and
smile.

In all that concerned Fraeulein Ku