He had lain here on the edge of the forest, under the great beech-tree, in the darkness of the night, and plucked up the moss, and cursed himself and the whole world because, by the pale light of the moon, he had seen two happy lovers. Now the sun glared broadly upon his couch of pain, as if it wished to show him how childish his grief had been, and that he should have reserved his despair for this hour. She had been happy! Gotthold tried to laugh, but the sound that came from his tortured breast was a cry, a dull moaning cry like that of a wounded animal. Even so had he wailed when he tottered along this very path through the sultry woods that night, and the trees danced around him in the dim moonlight like mocking spectres. Now they stood in brazen sun-steeped ranks, and seemed to say: What do we care for your self-created anguish, you fool! And what do I care for your misery! said the sea, which, now as he emerged from the forest upon the bluff, stretched before him in a blackish-blue expanse, as if petrified in its unapproachable majesty. He had seen it under this aspect once before, one afternoon when he had been wandering along the rocky cliffs of Anacapri, and it had given him the subject for one of his best paintings; but now he only bestowed a passing thought upon it, as the memory of the cool forest shade and murmuring fountain by which he sat a short time before, flits through the burning brain of a sun-scorched wanderer on a dusty highway. Below him in the little inlet, which had been toilsomely dug in the rocky shore, were the boats which belonged to the estate. During the last few days he had often used the smaller one to row to various places along the coast, and had the key of the chain by which it was fastened to the stake in his pocket. Broader and broader grew the shadow which fell from the shore upon the sea and overtook Gotthold, as with powerful strokes he began to row across the wide bay, at whose extreme southern point stood the beach-house, now brightly illumined by the sunlight. But the shadow did not proceed from the shore, but a black wall of clouds which, of perfectly uniform breadth, rose slowly in the heavens, and whose sharp upper edge glowed and sparkled with a gloomy fire. It was a heavy thunderstorm from the land. Well, let it come! Gotthold longed to escape from the sultry atmosphere that brooded over his soul, and breathe freely once more in the strife of the elements. A fiery shaft quivered across the black wall of clouds, then a second, a third; and with marvellous speed the dark curtain rose higher and higher, extinguishing every gleam of light in sky and shore, and upon the sea, over which the wind now whistled in gusts, furrowing its mirror-like surface and soon lashing it into foaming surges.