"Then come along, in the devil's name, you witch; but no shrieking and bawling. Get into the boat, Kohle; so, lift him carefully now--and you, girl, take a seat in the middle. It's true, it won't do any harm if he has something softer under his head than this bundle of sticks." A few minutes more and the slender boat pushed off from the shore. Schnetz rowed and Kohle sat at the tiller again; but, instead of the merry company that had occupied these same seats but a few hours before, amusing themselves with singing and flute-playing, there now lay on the bottom of the boat a white, silent passenger, with closed eyes; and at his head crouched a pale girl, who, from time to time, silently dried with her long red locks the heavy drops of blood which oozed out from under the bandages. Her head was sunk upon her breast. The others must not see how the big tear-drops coursed steadily down her cheeks. CHAPTER VIII. Up-stairs, in a bare, meanly-furnished room of the tavern, lay Irene. The dim beams of the setting sun shone in through the little window-panes, which were still dripping from the rain, but did not penetrate to the sofa where the poor girl cowered in an agony of grief, covering her face with her hands and vainly trying to close her ears so tightly with the folds of her hood that she should not hear the music of the waltz below. The walls and floors of the lightly-built upper story groaned under the regular step of the dance. Never in all her life, she thought, had she been more wretched and miserable, not even in those gloomy days before she resolved to write Felix a letter of farewell. Then there was still a certain greatness, dignity, and harmony left both within and about her; now her condition was painful and revolting to a degree that seemed almost pitiably ridiculous. She, lying up here in torture; and he down below in the best of spirits, whirling about with a waiter-girl in his arms, to the music of a peasant's orchestra--not among the other wedding-guests even, but apart, secretly, in the way one only dances when one is very much in the mood for it, or very much in love! She did not even have the consolation of thinking he had done this merely out of defiance to her, out of secret lovesickness and grief. He could not possibly have had a suspicion that she would come down and surprise him at his dance; that she would see how tightly the girl clung to him, and how reluctantly she finally released herself from his arms. She had flown up-stairs as if pursued by a ghost, had pushed the bolt to behind her with trembling hands, and had thrown herself on the hard little sofa, and shut her eyes and bowed her head as if now the death blow might fall at any moment. And down below, the jovial bassviol hummed and buzzed, and the clarionet abandoned itself to the most extravagant passages.