Was that not the roar of the sea that sounded from afar? Was it not the proud Melusina who sang as she bathed her beautiful form in the billows. How small, how speechlessly she herself had stood beside that other, yonder by the oak! What a homely little flower was she herself beside that splendid exotic! With what spirit, with what fire that other one could speak--and how shyly she herself brought out such every-day words. Was it a marvel, that the poet turned away from her and followed the admired singer? But even if she were not beautiful, not proud, not intellectual, she yet had a sense of her own worth, and would not allow herself to be insulted with impunity. Come ye waves, and if ye have kissed the dark hair of the bathing beauty, then rush upon the strand and efface for evermore the name of the poet, which, with the point of a parasol, love has written upon the sand; efface it there, and also--in my heart. Scalding tears gushed from the maiden's eyes, she shut the window that the surging of the distant sea might not reverberate in her dreams like a triumphal song of victorious love! Weeping, she threw herself upon her bed, but then slept soundly and well, as youth can sleep. She owned a determined mind, she had indeed cast clods of earth upon the coffin of a first, tender affection, which, as yet, had hardly outgrown the incipient bud. CHAPTER II. THE BLUE CAMPANULA. Woodland gloom--high beeches form a temple's hall--mighty oaks keep watch before it; in their midst a green glade in which a hill rises clad with weeping willows and large fronded ferns growing on every side. Eva sits upon the hill, she has fled from the forester's little house, whither the party of visitors from Warnicken had made an excursion, which was presided over by the Regierungsrath, who knew all the paths in these beautiful Samland woods. There was the Frau Gerichtsräthin with her daughters, the Frau Banquier with her gallant son, whose Latin mistakes made him uncertain of the upper form in the Kniephof College, but who had a flower culled from a poetical casket ready for every lady; there were yet other ladies and girls all in light straw hats, beneath which the withered faces of town cousins looked very odd; yet they, too, all continued their handicraft here, and the echoes of the woods and the little room of the forest-house rang again with city tales, and with the recapitulation of every folly that occurred in the town of pure reason. Eva fled from this sociable circle; alone she followed a footpath into the wood, farther and farther until she reached that solitude, that spot dedicated to melancholy, where the weeping willows rock whisperingly in the wind.