She laughed wildly, and the wind, which had carried away her hat, blew her long hair about her, some locks crossing her deadly-white face, distorted now to a ghastly smile.
"She is mad!" muttered the Count, drawing back as far as he could. He could have wished it had been farther. They were on a miserably small strip of ground, which in the centre was shaped like a trough, with sides which yesterday had been at least five feet high, with sharp clear edges, and which the storm had already reduced to two or three feet of smooth surface. How long would it be before the last hand's breadth of sand remaining would be blown into the trough, and they would be left without the smallest shelter, even supposing that the flood did not rise above the summit?
And should neither of these things happen--should this point remain unsubmerged--the Count shuddered again and again. How could poor human nature endure it all--the driving storm, the torrents of spray which were unceasingly flung up over the hill, the long long night which now began to close in? Already his keen eyes could only just distinguish through the grey mist the dim outlines of the Golmberg, which was hardly a mile off. Wissow Head had entirely disappeared; the farm itself, barely three hundred yards from him, seemed every moment to sink deeper in the water, which, as far as his eye could reach, covered fields and meadows far inland, perhaps even as far as Warnow, which only appeared at intervals out of the mist like a phantom castle. To the right, the thundering, raging, roaring sea, around him the surf creeping higher and higher up the dune, and here and there sending up columns of spray over the already covered line of hills. And there--now seeming so close to him that he drew back in terror, and in the next moment so far off that she might have been on the Golmberg--the dark, motionless figure of the woman whose lips had clung to his only an hour before--no, no! no living, loved woman, but a spectre risen from depths of horror, and sitting there, crouched together, immovable, only to drive him mad!
And the wretched man cried aloud in his agony, and clasped his hands before his face and sobbed and whimpered like a child.
CHAPTER IX.
"It is half-past four," said Elsa, "we must go."
"You might remain here."
"I am not sure whether my father will have arrived yet; indeed, supposing he came by the midday train, he could not be at Warnow yet; but that terrible man is certainly there, expecting you, and perhaps may go away again without waiting for you---"
"I must speak to him," murmured Valerie.
"And you must not speak to him alone; I will not allow it; and so we must go."