When they left the table the late afternoon steamer came down the Kessine and called at the landing opposite the clubhouse. Effi sat by an open window with Crampas and Gieshübler, drinking coffee and watching the scene below. "Tomorrow morning at nine the same boat will take me up the river, and at noon I shall be in Berlin, and in the evening I shall be in Hohen-Cremmen, and Roswitha will walk beside me and carry the child in her arms. I hope it will not cry. Ah, what a feeling it gives me even today! Dear Gieshübler, were you ever so happy to see again your parental home?" [Illustation: _Permission F. Bruckmann A.-G. Munich_ PROCESSION AT GASTEIN Adolph von Menzel] "Yes, the feeling is not new to me, most gracious Lady, excepting only that I have never taken any little Annie with me, for I have none to take." CHAPTER XV Effi left home in the middle of August and was back in Kessin at the end of September. During the six weeks' visit she had often longed to return, but when she now reached the house and entered the dark hall into which no light could enter except the little from the stairway, she had a sudden feeling of fear and said to herself: "There is no such pale, yellow light in Hohen-Cremmen." A few times during the days in Hohen-Cremmen she had longed for the "Haunted house," but on the whole her life there had been full of happiness and contentment. To be sure, she had not known what to make of Hulda, who was not taking kindly to her rôle of waiting for a husband or fiancé to turn up. With the twins, however, she got along much better, and more than once when she played ball or croquet with them she entirely forgot that she was married. Those were happy moments. Her chief delight was, as in former days, to stand on the swing board as it flew through the air and gave her a tingling sensation, a shudder of sweet danger, when she felt she would surely fall the next moment. When she finally sprang out of the swing, she went with the two girls to sit on the bench in front of the schoolhouse and there told old Mr. Jahnke, who joined them, about her life in Kessin, which she said was half-hanseatic and half-Scandinavian, and anything but a replica of Schwantikow and Hohen-Cremmen.