The eyes of the rowers were turned towards the dune as they glided by, while the scene of deliverance on the night of the storm must have recurred to every man's memory, but no one spoke a word. Not because it would have been a breach of discipline. They knew that the Captain would always allow talk that was to the purpose at the right time, even when as to-day he was in full uniform, with the Iron Cross on his broad breast; but he had pulled his cocked hat low down upon his forehead, and if he occasionally raised his eyes to see the course he was steering, they did not look gloomy--they had never seen him look gloomy yet, any more than they had ever heard a bad word from his mouth--but very grave and sad. They would not disturb the Captain's meditations. Grave and sad meditations--graver and sadder than the honest fellows could imagine or comprehend. What to them were the two people whom they had rescued from death on this sand-hill, with untold efforts and at the repeated risk of their own lives; what were they to them but a couple more fellow-creatures, saved as a matter of duty, and added to the others whom they had already saved that day? As to how Count Golm and the young lady had got there, and the relation in which they stood to each other--what did they care about that? But he! He had shuddered when he found the brilliant Carla von Wallbach, whom he had seen a few days before flirting and coquetting in the light of the chandeliers, in the drawing-room at Warnow--now cowering on the storm-beaten dune, a picture of utter misery, her clothes soaked through with wet, her tender limbs shaken by icy cold, half out of her senses with terror, and hardly resembling a human creature; as he carried her to the boat, and at the moment when he laid her down, she woke from her stupor, and recognising him, shrieked wildly: "Save me from him! Save me!" and clung terrified to him--a stranger--as a child might cling to his mother, so that he had to use force to free himself! The Count was in a hardly less pitiable condition, when two of the men carried him into the boat and laid him down near Carla; but then he suddenly started up, and at the risk of falling overboard staggered to the bow of the boat, and there sat lost in gloomy meditation, taking no notice of anything that passed, till they had worked their way to the Pölitz's farm, and prepared to take the poor wretches there into the boat through the window of the attic in which they had taken refuge. Then he had sprung to his feet, and shrieked like a madman that he would not be packed in together with those people! he would not! and had laid violent hands on the men, till he was cowed by the threat that they would tie his hands if he did not implicitly obey the Captain's orders; and then, covering his face with his hands, he had devoured his wrath in silence.