"If only my foot did not burn like very hell-fire," she says once as Johannes takes her back to her place. "Then rest awhile." She laughs aloud, and when at the same moment Franz Maas comes to claim the dance of honor in his capacity of "rifle-king," she throws herself into his arms and whirls away. Johannes puts his hand to his burning brow, and looks after the couple, but the lights and the figures melt away before his eyes into one heaving chaos: everything seems to be turning round and round--he staggers--he has to clutch hold of a pillar to prevent himself from falling; and when at that moment Franz Maas returns with Trude, he begs him to take charge of his sister-in-law for half an hour; he must go out for a whiff of fresh air. He steps out of the hot, close tent, in which two candelabra filled with tallow candles diffuse an unbearable smoke--out into the clear, cool night. But here too are noise and fiddling! In the shooting booths the bolts of the air-guns are rattling, from the gaming tables comes the hoarse screaming of their owners, trying to allure people, and the merry-go-round spins along in the darkness, laden with all its glittering tawdriness and accompanied by shouting and clanging. In between everything sways the black, surging crowd. Behind the crests of the pine wood, which silently and gloomily towers above all the tumult, the sky is all aflame with glorious yellow light. Half an hour more and the moon will be pouring its smiling beams over the scene. Johannes walks along slowly between the tents.--In front of the "Crown" host's booth he stops and looks in through the window. But when he sees Martin sitting with a deeply flushed face amidst a swarm of rollicking carousers, he creeps back into the darkness, as if he were afraid to meet him. From the adjacent tent comes the sound of noisy singing. He hesitates for a moment, then enters, for his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth. He is received with a loud shout of delight. At a long beer-bedabbled table sits a host of his former schoolfellows, rowdy fellows, some of them, whom as a rule he seeks to avoid. They surround him; they drink to him; they press him to join their circle. "Why do you make yourself so scarce, Johannes?" one of them screams from the opposite end of the table, "and where do you stick of an evening?" "He dangles at the apron-strings of his lovely sister-in-law," sneers another. "Leave my sister-in-law out of the game," cries Johannes with knitted brows. These proceedings sicken him; this hoarse screaming offends his ear; these coarse jests hurt him. He pours down a few glasses of cool beer and goes outside, with great difficulty succeeding in shaking off the importunate fellows.