ed in the
darkness, she turned back, saying fiercely through her set teeth: "Rush
on to ruin, you headstrong creature! If I see aright, the magnificence
here is already tottering. Go and get wet! I've made my profit, and the
two unfinished gowns can be added to the account. The Lord is my witness
that I meant well. But will she ever do what sensible people advise?
Always running her head against the wall. Whoever will not hear, must
feel."

She hastened back into the house as she spoke to escape the pouring
rain, but Barbara paid little heed to the wet, and waded on through the
mire of the road.

The force of the storm was broken, the wind had subsided, distant
flashes of lightning still illumined the northern horizon, and the night
air was stiflingly sultry. No one appeared in the road, and yet some
belated pedestrian might run against her at any moment, for the dense
darkness shrouded even the nearest objects. But she knew the way, and
had determined to follow the Danube and go along the woodlands to the
tanner's pit, whence the Hiltner house was easily reached. In this way
she could pass around the gate, which otherwise she would have been
obliged to have opened.

But ere gaining the river she was to learn that she had undertaken a
more difficult task than she expected. Her father had never allowed her
to go out after dark, unaccompanied, even in the neighbourhood, and the
terrors of night show their most hideous faces to those who are burdened
by anxious cares. Several times she sank so deep into the mud that her
shoe stuck fast in it, and she was obliged to force it on again with
much difficulty. As she walked on and a strange, noise reached her from
the woodyard on her left, when she constantly imagined that she heard
another step following hers like an audible shadow, when drunken
raftsmen came toward her, hoarsely singing an obscene song, she pressed
against a fence in order not to be seen by the dissolute fellows. But
now a light came wavering toward her, looking like a shining bird flying
slowly, or a hell-hound, with glowing eyes, and at the sight it seemed
to her impossible to wander on all alone. But the mysterious light
proved to be only a lantern in the hand of an old woman who had been
to fetch a doctor, so she summoned up fresh courage, though she told
herself that here near the lumber yards she might easily encounter
raftsmen and guards watching the logs and planks piled on the banks of
the river,