"You may tell whom you will."
"Oh! how pleased I am! You could not have given me greater pleasure than to tell me this. It makes me feel quite young again. Such a charming gentleman as he is, and such a dear, dear young lady! I feel sure that everything must go right now."
She kissed Elsa's hand again and again, with hot tears. Elsa gently disengaged herself. "I will tell you everything next time. Now I must go."
"No," said Frau Pölitz, standing up, "you must not walk such a long way; my husband shall drive you."
"I am determined to walk," said Elsa.
"You cannot be back before dark. It is already beginning to get dark, and we are certainly going to have bad weather."
Elsa would allow no objection to weigh with her. She was a good walker and had eyes like a hawk. She feared neither the distance nor the darkness.
With that she once more shook Frau Pölitz's hand, and the next minute had left room, and house, and farm, and was walking quickly through the fields along the road, of which the farmer's wife had spoken, towards the headland, whose broad mass stood out from the wide plain.
CHAPTER III.
It was three miles, Frau Pölitz had to Wissow Head, but it seemed to Elsa as if the long, winding road would never come to an end. And yet she walked so quickly, that the little empty waggon which at first was far ahead of her, was now as far behind. That wretched vehicle was the only sign of human life. Besides that, only the brown plain, like a desert waste, as far as her eye could reach. No large trees, only here and there a few stunted willows, and some wretched shrubs by the ditches which intersected each other here and there, and by the broad sluggish stream which she now crossed by means of a rickety and unprotected wooden bridge. The stream evidently flowed from the chain of hills on her right hand, at the foot of which Elsa could see far apart the buildings of Gristow and of Damerow, the two other properties belonging to Warnow.