rieks, goaded by the
exigencies of the situation.

The last we saw of the carriage was a yellow glint as the sun caught the
shiny surface of my bandbox; immediately afterwards it vanished over the
edge of a far-away dip in the road, and we were alone with Nature.

Gertrud and I stared at each other in speechless dismay. Then she looked
on in silence while I sank on to a milestone and laughed. There was
nothing, her look said, to laugh at, and much to be earnest over in our
tragic predicament, and I knew it but I could not stop. August had had
no instructions as to where he was driving to or where we were going to
put up that night; of Putbus and Marianna North he had never heard. With
the open ordnance map on my lap I had merely called out directions,
since leaving Miltzow, at cross-roads. Therefore in all human
probability he would drive straight on till dark, no doubt in growing
private astonishment at the absence of orders and the length of the way;
then when night came he would, I supposed, want to light his lamps, and
getting down to do so would immediately be frozen with horror at what he
saw, or rather did not see, in the carriage. What he would do after that
I could not conceive. In sheerest despair I laughed till I cried, and
the sight of Gertrud watching me silently from the middle of the
deserted road only made me less able to leave off. Behind us in the
distance, at the end of a vista of _chaussee_ trees, were the houses of
Garz; in front of us, a long way in front of us, rose the red spire of
the church of Casnewitz, a village through which, as I still remembered
from the map now driving along by itself, our road to Putbus lay. Up and
down the whiteness of this road not a living creature, either in a cart
or on its legs, was to be seen. The bald country, here very bald and
desolate, stretched away on either side into nothingness. The wind
sighed about, whisking little puffs of derisive dust into our eyes as it
passed. There was a dreadful absence of anything like sounds.

'No doubt,' said Gertrud, 'August will soon return?'

'He won't,' I said, wiping my eyes; 'he'll go on for ever. He's wound
up. Nothing will stop him.'

'What, then, will the gracious one do?'

'Walk after him, I suppose,' I said, getting up, 'and trust to something
unexpected making him find out he hasn't got us. But I'm afraid nothing
will. Come on, Gertrud,' I continued, feigning briskness while my heart
was as lead, 'it's nearly