'I never doubted it.'
'I mean I know the way from here. I was going there anyhow, and Charlotte knew that. But we can't go on yet, dear Professor. The horses would never get us there. It must be at least ten miles off, and awful sand the whole way.'
It took me some time and many words to convince him that nothing would make me move till the horses had had a feed and a rest. 'We'll only stay here a few hours,' I comforted, 'and get to Wiek anyhow to-day.'
'But who can tell whether she will be there two nights running?' cried the Professor, excitedly striding about in the mud.
'Why, we can, when we get there, and it's no use bothering till we are there. But I'm sure she'll wait till I come. Let us go in out of the rain.'
'I will hire a cart,' he announced with great determination.
'What, and go on without me?'
'I tell thee I will hire a cart. No time shall be lost.'
And he ran back again to the landlord who was watching us from the door with much disapproval; for I suppose Charlotte's refusal to consider his accommodation worthy of her had not disposed him well towards her friends, and possibly he considered the Professor's rapid movements among the puddles too unaccountable to be nice. There was no cart, he said, absolutely none; and the Professor, in a state of fuming dejection, was forced to what resignation he could muster.
During this parleying I had been sitting alone under the umbrella, the rain falling monotonously on its vast surface, running off the glazed lid of my yellow bandbox in streams, and dripping from the brim of August's hat down his patient neck. A yard or two behind sat Gertrud on the hold-all, dimly visible through the cloud of steam rising from the back of her soaked cart-horse. I could hear the sea at the foot of the cliff sluggishly heaving on and off the shingle, and I could see it over the edge of the cliff to the east, and here for the first time round the bend of the island to the north. It was flat, oily, and brown. Never was such a dreary sea or such a melancholy spot. I got out and went into the house feeling depressed.