The fir-tree against which he was leaning creaked and groaned like a tortured beast; Ottomar saw how the roots rose and strained, and the marl wore away the steep slope, while the wind whistled and howled through the cracked branches, like shot and bullets, and a roll of thunder came from the sea as from a ceaseless volley of batteries. "I had it so easy then!" mused Ottomar. "My father would have paid the few debts I had and would have been proud of me, instead of now sending me a pistol, as if I didn't know as well as he that it is all over with Ottomar von Werben; and Else had spoken often and fondly of her brother, who fell at Vionville. Dear Else, how I should like to see her once more!" He had heard from the innkeeper that the carriage with the ladies must pass here, along the only still passable road, if they came back in the evening as the coachman had said they would; the shorter way down through the lowlands was no longer intact. Ottomar wondered what the man could have meant by the lowlands. The situation was so entirely different, as he knew it, from the description; the sea appeared to break immediately behind the castle, even though he could no longer distinguish particular objects in the wet gray mist which beat upon him. The castle itself, which certainly lay close below him, seemed to be a quarter of an hour distant; he would hardly have seen it at times if lights had not continually flickered from the windows. Also among the indistinguishable mass of buildings to the left of the castle, which were probably in the court, lights flashed up occasionally, changing their position as when men run to and fro with lanterns. A few times it seemed to him as if he heard human cries and the lowing of cattle. It might all be a delusion of the senses, which began to fail the longer he sat unprotected in the raging storm that froze the marrow in his bones. He must be off if he would not perish here like a highwayman by the roadside!