What a shudder went through him when he found the brilliant Carla von Wallbach, whom he had seen dancing and coquetting a few days before, under the light of the candelabra, through the reception room at Warnow--now a picture of extreme misery, her clothes drenched with water, her delicate limbs trembling from the icy cold, with half dazed senses, curled up in a heap scarcely like a human form, and bore her to the boat; with horror he recalled the moment when he laid her down in the boat--how she, awaking from her stupor and recognizing him, had cried out as if mad, "Save me from him, from him!"--and held him, the strange man, anxiously in her grasp, as a child its mother, so that he had to release himself by force! And when the Count, who was in a scarcely less lamentable condition, having been carried by two pilots into the boat and placed near Carla, suddenly staggered up again at the risk of falling overboard, tottered to the bow of the boat and there sat brooding in sullen disdain, disregarding everything that went on about him, until they worked their way to the Pölitz premises and made ready to bring the wretched people through the window of the garret to which they had fled, into the boat--then he sprang up and shrieked like a madman that he did not wish to be packed in with those people, that he would not have it so!--And he belabored those about him until he was deterred by the threat that they would bind him if he did not obey the orders of the Commander--at which he covered his face with his hands, and sullenly swallowed his wrath. There was the garret, and there was the window opening--they had torn out the window and knocked out a piece of the wall to make room--and Reinhold remembered that he himself had succeeded in rescuing wretched people from this dreadful desolation, that he had been able to carry frail human forms through the storm and blackness into the safe port of the castle, where all danger was over. The passage from the inundated court to the castle lasted only a few minutes--the storm had hurled the boat before it like a snowflake--but those had been the only moments when his own heart trembled, not with fear, but with tender solicitude. His eyes grew moist as he now recalled it all--the mother who lay in the boat with her little one at her breast, her head upon the knees of her husband, while poor Marie, full of compassion, held the fainting Carla in her arms. How must the wretched man in the bow of the boat have felt at this sight if he once raised his eyes! The raging haste with which he jumped out and rushed away when they touched the landing of the castle to conceal himself somewhere in the darkness--it was Cain fleeing from the dead body of his slain brother.