"Papa was not well this morning, but he has nevertheless gone shooting. I have been to meet him with Griff, but we could not find him; he must have taken another way home."
She joined the two gentlemen, who now left the mountain-road and took the somewhat steep path leading to Wolkenstein Court. Griff seemed scarcely reconciled to the presence of the young engineer: he greeted him with a growl and showed his teeth.
"What is the matter with Griff?" Reinsfeld asked. "He is usually kindly and good-humoured with everybody."
"He does not seem to include me in his universal philanthropy," said Elmhorst, with a shrug. "He has made me several such declarations of war, and his good humour cannot always be depended upon; bestirred up a terrible uproar in Heilborn, in the Herr President's drawing-room, where Fräulein von Thurgau achieved a deed of positive heroism in comforting a little child whom the dog had nearly frightened to death."
"And, meanwhile, Herr Elmhorst applied himself to the succour of the fainting ladies," Erna said, ironically. "Upon my return to the drawing-room I observed his courteous attentions to both Alice and Frau von Lasberg,--how impartially he deluged both with cologne. Oh, it was diverting in the extreme!"
She laughed merrily. For an instant Elmhorst compressed his lips with an angry glance at the girl, but the next he rejoined politely: "You took such instant possession of the heroic part in the drama, Fräulein von Thurgau, that nothing was left for me but my insignificant rôle. You cannot accuse me of timidity after meeting me upon the Wolkenstein, although in my entire ignorance of the locality I did not reach the summit."
"And you never will reach it," Reinsfeld interposed. "The summit is inaccessible; even the boldest mountaineers are checked by those perpendicular walls, and more than one foolhardy climber has forfeited his life in the attempt to ascend them."
"Does the mountain-sprite guard her throne so jealously?" Elmhorst asked, laughing. "She seems to be a most energetic lady, tossing about avalanches as if they were snowballs, and requiring as many human sacrifices yearly as any heathen goddess."
He looked up to the Wolkenstein,[[1]] which justified its title: while all the other mountain-summits were defined clearly against the sky, its top was hidden in white mists.
"You ought not to jest about it, Wolfgang," said the young physician, with some irritation. "You have never yet spent an autumn and winter here, and you do not know her, our wild mountain-sprite, the fearful elemental force of the Alps, which only too frequently menaces the lives and the dwellings of the poor mountaineers. She is feared, not without reason, here in her realm; but you seem to have become quite familiar with the legend."