For a moment she crouched down on the drenched grass to recover breath, and looked at her blistered palms, which were bleeding. She wiped the blood away with her tongue, and laughed. Then she threw a frightened glance into the thicket where ruddy sunlight lay on the yellow leaves. The brook which ran down to the river tossed dirty grey rainwater over the slimy stones, between which were heaped stacks of dead damp leaves. The tongues of fern growing along the edge of the water were nipped and shrivelled up, and they looked as they stood there like little wrinkled old women in their blurred brown rags. Not far off were a greasy company of toadstools spreading their smooth copula-shaped heads, delicately fluted underneath. They shone as if they had been rolling in butter. In disgust at these rotting excrescences of damp weather, Hertha strode over them and struck into the thick of the thorny shrubs, which sorely thwarted her progress. Everywhere brambles, hung with raindrops like chains of pearls, switched her in the face, and her footmarks on the swampy moss, into which she sank, became glittering pools as she walked on. It was a path along which the enchanted princesses of fairy tale might have wandered; but she was not in the least afraid, and when she saw a cluster of blue-black sloeberries glistening at her feet, she stooped and gathered them carefully in the palm of her hand. At last the clearing lay before her, bathed in the purple rays of the sinking sun. She paused, filled with reverent awe, and looked round her. The evening shadows had gathered over the little temple, and the wind-tossed branches scattered upon it their burden of fading leaves. There was a sighing and moaning in the air, as if the whole army of spirits with whom the legends of the neighbourhood populated the wood were assembled on this very spot. And there on the edge of the boscage was the old sacrificial stone, standing like an altar ready for a new offering of blood. A cold shiver began to creep over her, but she suppressed it quickly. Let those who were cowards or who had guilty consciences be afraid. She stood still in front of the temple of friendship, and gazed up in astonishment at the sandstone figures. "Which of the two is meant for Leo?" she wondered, and for the first time she fully realised the great wrong which was being done the man called Ulrich. The thought made her uneasy, and the longer she dwelt on it the blacker were the depths of depravity that it seemed to reach. She turned her back, for she could no longer bear the sight of the two friends with their arms twined round each other. "One is a liar," she murmured to herself; and she felt just then as if all truth and good faith had vanished from the world--as if even yonder sun was a monstrous blood-red lie.