Walpurga spoke so earnestly and impressively that Hansei replied:
"I'll drive on with the household goods, and, if it suits you, you can follow in the covered wagon. Come as soon as you can. Uncle's here and he'll drive."
Walpurga nodded to Hansei, who started up the mountain with the loaded wagon. Then she went to a chest and took out a full suit. She carried the clothes into the thicket, where she found Irma sitting beside the mother, Irma's head resting against the breast of the old woman, who had wound her arms around her.
"Irmgard will be quite happy with us; we know each other, already," said the mother.
No one on earth knows what Irma confessed to old Beate, down among the willows by the lake. The old woman breathed thrice on her brow, as if her warm breath could dispel the charm.
"And now put on your clothes," said Beate. In the thicket, Irma exchanged her dress for the peasant's garb.
When she left the thicket and returned to the path, she kept her eyes fixed on the ground. She was now entering upon a new world--a new life.
She looked at the beings and the objects in the parlor of the inn, as if it were all a dream. She had come back to the world again from the depths of the lake. Here, life was going on as usual; there was eating and drinking, laughing and talking, singing, driving, riding--all this she had already left far behind her. She was as one risen from the dead. Silent, and with folded hands, she sat upon the bench, caring nothing for the world about her, longing for only perfect solitude. And yet her ear was so acute that she overheard the hostess whisper to Walpurga: "A kinswoman, I suppose," and, significantly putting her finger to her forehead, "she don't seem to be in her right wits."
"Maybe you're right," replied Walpurga. A smile, as of pain, passed over Irma's beautiful lips: "There's one protecting disguise--and it is madness."
She felt if a net of thorns had descended upon her head. Insanity may, indeed, sometimes serve as an invisible cap, concealing, or rather disguising, the sorrow-stricken wearer.