with singing and flute-playing, there now
lay on the bottom of the boat a white, silent passenger, with closed
eyes; and at his head crouched a pale girl, who, from time to time,
silently dried with her long red locks the heavy drops of blood which
oozed out from under the bandages. Her head was sunk upon her breast.
The others must not see how the big tear-drops coursed steadily down
her cheeks.

CHAPTER VIII.

Up-stairs, in a bare, meanly-furnished room of the tavern, lay Irene.

The dim beams of the setting sun shone in through the little
window-panes, which were still dripping from the rain, but did not
penetrate to the sofa where the poor girl cowered in an agony of grief,
covering her face with her hands and vainly trying to close her ears so
tightly with the folds of her hood that she should not hear the music
of the waltz below. The walls and floors of the lightly-built upper
story groaned under the regular step of the dance. Never in all her
life, she thought, had she been more wretched and miserable, not even
in those gloomy days before she resolved to write Felix a letter of
farewell. Then there was still a certain greatness, dignity, and
harmony left both within and about her; now her condition was painful
and revolting to a degree that seemed almost pitiably ridiculous.

She, lying up here in torture; and he down below in the best of
spirits, whirling about with a waiter-girl in his arms, to the music of
a peasant's orchestra--not among the other wedding-guests even, but
apart, secretly, in the way one only dances when one is very much in
the mood for it, or very much in love! She did not even have the
consolation of thinking he had done this merely out of defiance to her,
out of secret lovesickness and grief. He could not possibly have had a
suspicion that she would come down and surprise him at his dance; that
she would see how tightly the girl clung to him, and how reluctantly
she finally released herself from his arms.

She had flown up-stairs as if pursued by a ghost, had pushed the bolt
to behind her with trembling hands, and had thrown herself on the hard
little sofa, and shut her eyes and bowed her head as if now the death
blow might fall at any moment. And down below, the jovial bassviol
hummed and buzzed, and the clarionet abandoned itself to the most
extravagant passages.

For the moment she hated this man, whom heretofore, through all their
separation,