y cushions, and said, 'Pay me.'

'Pay him, Gertrud,' I said; and having been paid he turned his horse and
drove back to Casnewitz scornful to the last.

'Go on, August,' I ordered. 'Go on. We can hold this thing on with our
feet. Get on to your box and go on.'

The energy in my voice penetrated at last through his agitation. He got
up on to his box, settled himself in a flustered sort of fashion, the
tourists fell apart staring their last and hardest at a vision about to
vanish, and we drove away.

'It is impossible to forget that which has not been,' called out the
dissatisfied man as August passed him.

'It is what I say--it is what I say!' cried August, irritated.

Nothing could have kept me in Putbus after this.

Skirting the circus on the south side we turned down a hill to the
right, and immediately were in the country again with cornfields on
either side and the sea like a liquid sapphire beyond them. Gertrud and
I put a coat between us in place of the abandoned tea-basket, and
settled in with an appreciation of our comforts that we had not had
before. Gertrud, indeed, looked positively happy, so thankful was she to
be safely in the carriage again, and joy was written in every line of
August's back. About a mile and a half off lay Lauterbach, a little
straggling group of houses down by the water; and quite by itself, a
mile to the left of Lauterbach, I could see the hotel we were going to,
a long white building something like a Greek temple, with a portico and
a flight of steps the entire length of its facade, conspicuous in its
whiteness against a background of beechwoods. Woods and fields and sea
and a lovely little island a short way from the shore called Vilm, were
bathed in sunset splendour. Lauterbach and not Putbus, then, was the
place of radiant jelly-fish and crystal water and wooded coves. Probably
in those distant years when Marianne North enjoyed them Lauterbach as an
independent village with a name to itself did not exist. A branch
railway goes down now to the very edge of the sea. We crossed the line
and drove between chestnut trees and high grassy banks starry with
flowers to the Greek hotel.

How delightful it looked as we got out of the deep chestnut lane into
the open space in front of it before we were close enough to see that
time had been unkind. The sea was within a stone's throw on the right
beyond a green, marshy, rushy meadow. On the left people were mowing in
a field. Across the