ufficiently startling to carry any ordinary widow away.

We left the next morning, pursued by the widow's blessings,--blessings
of great potency, I suppose, of the same degree of potency exactly as
the curses of orphans, and we all know the peculiar efficaciousness of
those. 'Good creature,' said Charlotte, touched by the number of them as
we drove away; 'I am so glad I was able to help her a little by opening
her eyes.'

'The operation,' I observed, 'is not always pleasant.'

'But invariably necessary,' said Charlotte with decision.

What then was my astonishment on looking back, as we were turning the
corner by the red-brick hotel, to take a last farewell of the pretty
white house on the shore, to see Hedwig hanging out of an upper window
waving a duster to Gertrud who was following us in the luggage cart, and
chatting and laughing while she did it with the widow standing at the
gate below. 'That house is certainly haunted,' I exclaimed. 'There's a
fresh ghost looking out of the window at this very moment.'

Charlotte turned her head with an incredulous face. Having seen the
apparition she turned it back again.

'It can't be Hedwig,' I hastened to assure her, 'because you told me she
had been sent to her mother in the country. It can only, then, be
Hedwig's ghost. She is very young to have one, isn't she?'

But Charlotte said nothing at all; and so we left Binz in silence, and
got into the sandy road and pine forest that takes you the first part of
your way towards the north and Sassnitz.

The road I had meant to take goes straight from Binz along the narrow
tongue of land, marked Schmale Heide on the map, separating the Baltic
Sea from the inland sea called Jasmunder Bodden; but outside the village
I saw a sheet of calm water shining through pine trunks on the left, and
I got out to go and look at it, and August, always nervous when I got
out, drove off the beaten track after me, and so we missed our way.

The water was the Schmachter See, a real lake in size, not a pond like
the exquisite little Schwarze See, and I stood on the edge admiring its
morning loveliness as it lay without a ripple in the sun, the noise of
the sea on the other side of the belt of pines sounding unreal as the
waves of a dream on that still shore. And while I was standing among its
reeds August was busy thinking out a short cut that would strike the
road we had left higher up. The result was that we very soon went
astray, and emergin