Elly looked alarmed. "Oh dear I what are you going to do?" she cried, tripping about on the steps of the landing-stage. "Do come back and be good!" The exhortation "be good" she had retained from her childhood. Hertha clasped her hands behind her head and stared into the distance, dumbly weaving fancies. Out into the current, circling with the eddies, swept ever onwards away to the wide ocean--into the blue immensity, that was what she longed for at this moment. Then drawing herself erect, she asked, "I say, how does the boat come here?" "Leo used to keep it years ago, lying on the sandbank, so that he could get over by it quickly to Uhlenfelde and the Isle of Friendship," Elly informed her. The Isle of Friendship! A double romance cast its halo about the little island, with its hazel-nut bushes, and high-arched coronet of alders and birches above, which, like the curly head of some drowned giant, reared itself from the water and looked fiercely across to the other side. A tiny morsel of white masonry gleamed through the sombre density of the foliage. That must be the temple of which the country-folk with superstitious awe whispered mysterious legends into each other's ears. In ancient times the island had been the scene of heathen sacrifices. It was said that the terrible stone was still to be seen from which the Druid priest had spurted the blood of the slain victim towards heaven. And when on dark nights you passed the island, you saw, even now, figures swathed in long white robes crouching in the branches of the alders. In more modern times, the two friends had invoked the old spirit, and brought it back to life. And people related, besides, that on either side of the mossy sacrificial stone they had each opened a vein of the other, and drank the warm blood; that they had composed hymns to the white statue, and burnt incense before it, so that red fire was seen rising nightly into the sky. Hertha had heard all this from Elly's lips at school, and it had fired her imagination. The romances of her history-primers, the heroes of which had long ago been cast away as rubbish with her old exercise and composition books, lived again, a decade later, in her soul, glowing and glorious with mystery. Before she knew Halewitz at all, she had pined to see the Isle of Friendship, and as, thanks to grandmamma's anxious vigilance, she had not been allowed to set foot on it yet, the very thought of it possessed a magic which filled her with the same sweet thrills which had been her delight in twilight hours at school. She got up, and stretched out her arms longingly. If only she might get across! At that instant her eye caught sight of an oar lying horizontally along the edge of the boat and wedged into it, but the twin oar was missing. An audacious plan began to take shape in her mind. She remembered to have seen an old key hanging up inside the bathing-house, which apparently belonged to the boat. She would make Elly fetch it.