She shrank from him slightly. "Yes, I will," she said in a toneless voice. Ten minutes later the white boat put off from the landing-place. Leo watched it from behind the bushes. She did not wave her hand in farewell, neither did she look round, and he felt grateful to her for it. When she landed on the opposite bank, it seemed to him as if she sank on the ground for a moment because she was either exhausted or crying. He turned back to the temple deep in thought. The mist had quite dispersed, and so he was obliged to hang about the island, in hiding for another hour or more. Warm noontide sunlight lay on the lawn. Wasps with wide outspread wings floated humming about the blackberry clusters. A slow-worm crawled lazily over the half-dry pebbles. Now and then there came from the Halewitz fields a jocund cry, which slowly died away on the air. It was the ploughman working not far from the river. Yonder lay his acres; his work, his happiness. Plagued by restlessness, he ran to and fro in front of the temple, the statues looking down on him indifferently with their frozen smile. The soft sandstone out of which they were sculptured had begun to decay. The full-blooming boys' faces had grown wrinkled, and were full of scars and pits, as if the leaves had rotted them. The arm of one was shattered as far as the elbow, and the stump projected from the upper part of the body like a post nailed into the flesh. "We must get you restored, you poor fellow," he said, and drew himself erect with a broken-hearted sigh. XV Hertha awoke. The flies buzzed about in the purple duskiness; broad midday sunshine came through the chinks of the shutters and the red curtains. "I must have dreamed it," she thought, laying her arm beneath her head and laughing up blissfully at the ceiling. And then she slowly realised that this time it could be no dream. A warm glow flooded her face. She shut her eyes and didn't think. It seemed as if her body were drifting, and as if she must die of happiness. What had her existence been yesterday, and what was it to-day? A wild hoyden had been carried down the stream, and then he had found her, and made her a woman with the magic of his love. She jumped out of bed with a sharp exclamation, and began to dress. When she stood before the glass she contemplated herself for a long time. "How funny!" she said. "I look the same as usual." She passed Elly's bed on tiptoe. The girl was sleeping away her tears and fright of the day before in rosy, peaceful slumbers. A fly had alighted on the corner of one of her eyelids. Hertha flicked it off. "And _she_ talks about love," she thought, and shrugged her shoulders.