Valerie did not answer. She did not wish to tell her dear niece how very differently the matter appeared to her; how she believed, on the contrary, that it was just his father's intervention that had made Ottomar's union with Ferdinanda impossible; and that even his consent in Elsa's case was not the hearty approval of a loving father, but that of a man who unwillingly allows what he cannot prevent, without violating his highest principles of justice. Elsa was silent also; her thoughts had flown forward in advance of the carriage, which seemed hardly to make any progress, in spite of all the efforts of their bold driver and powerful horses. They would have been even slower in their movements over the ill-made road, which in some places was almost destroyed by the rain, if the hill, along the side of which they were driving, had not broken the force of the gale. Two or three times only, on rising ground, they met its full power, and then it seemed almost a miracle that the whole equipage was not blown over. Still it held firm, and so did the horses, who repeatedly had to stand still and stem the blast with the whole weight of their bodies. At such moments when they could see over the plain to the left, right down to the sea, the two ladies saw with terror, above the long waving line of the grey dunes from Golmberg to the point, another white line rising and falling, and here and there shooting up thirty or forty feet into the air, and falling upon the land in dense clouds. They knew that this was surf, the surf of that same sea whose waves generally rippled and splashed on the smooth sand, fifty or a hundred yards away from the foot of the dunes, as they had done on that rainy evening when Elsa stood there wrapped in her cloak, and the waving grasses on the edge of the dunes behind her seemed to entice her on farther to more delightful adventures. Ah! her mind was no longer full of adventures! Whither had fled that bold and daring spirit which had thought it might defy fate? Whither the sunny cheerfulness which had then so filled her whole soul that that dark and rainy evening had seemed to her brighter than the brightest day! Whither, ah! whither, the joyous heart that knew nothing of love, nor wished to know anything excepting as the rose-scented, nightingale-haunted idea reflected back from the enchanted mirror of fancy and dreamland? Now the reality had come, in grim mockery of the bright fable of old! And yet--and yet! poor tormented heart, you would not resign it for Paradise, if you could not meet him there! "And if I did not meet him again!"