A small wood of pines crowned the highest point on the shore, to which the road now led upwards, becoming more and more rocky and steep. When Oswald turned round to look back, he noticed, at a distance of four or five hundred yards, the horseman whom he had seen at the inn. He rode keeping pace with the carriage, and when the latter stopped accidentally, because something was out of order in the harness, he also checked his horse till the carriage moved on again. Oswald, who had been struck by this manœuvre, asked the coachman a few minutes later to stop again. He turned round: the horseman also was stopping. He repeated the same manœuvre once more with the same success.
"That is very strange," said Oswald.
"Yes," replied the coachman; "I do not know what it can mean."
At that moment the horseman left the road and trotted off across the heath in the direction in which the coachman had said the farm-buildings of Cona were lying.
The carriage had reached the pines, which stood so close that one could not see the sea, and only heard its roaring as it mingled with the rush of the wind in the tall trees. Then it suddenly flashed up again at a turn in the road, and they saw before them, upon an open place looking upon the sea, a house built in Swiss cottage style, Oldenburg's summer-house.
CHAPTER IX.
When the carriage stopped on the open space before the door, surrounded by trees, and covered with dry brown leaves as with a carpet, Oldenburg appeared up stairs on a gallery, which divided the two stories and ran around the whole house. The next moment he was down at the door and shook Oswald heartily by the hand.
"There you are," he said. "I was almost afraid you would have done like most people, who, when they have once been in my company, do not care to renew the experiment."
"I do not know, baron, whether you show yourself to most people as you did to me," said Oswald; "if that is so, then I have at least a different taste from most people."
"Really, a salam in optima forma," said Oldenburg, smiling; "a couple of old gray-bearded sons of Mohammed could not do it better. Nothing is wanting but that we should now kiss the tips of our fingers. But come into the house; we'll be more-comfortable there."