"I am anxious, and I am not," said Brandow. "It is certainly a very dark night, and the road is not particularly good in one or two places, but Hinrich Scheel is a remarkably good driver, and--yes, it has just occurred to me--Gustav von Plüggen drove over the same road only a few minutes before our friends."
"Which does not prove that some mischance may not have befallen one or the other party, or perhaps both," answered Wollnow. "I say mischance, ladies, not misfortune, but even a trifling mischance--the breaking of a wheel, or anything of that sort--is no joke on such a night as this; and I am most decidedly in favor of going to meet our friends. I will accompany you, Herr Brandow, if agreeable to you."
"Certainly, of course, but I came on horseback," replied Brandow.
"Then we will take a carriage at the Fürstenhof; if anything has happened, a carriage may be useful to them."
Alma thought it very uncivil in the gentlemen to leave the ladies alone at such a moment, while Ottilie gave her husband a shawl, and whispered with a most affectionate kiss, "That's my own good Emil!"
Wollnow had requested the ladies to stay in the room. When the door was closed, he said, "I am sure some misfortune has happened to them; and so are you, are you not?"
His black eyes flashed so strangely, and looked so keen and piercing in the light of the lamp he carried in his hand, that Brandow shrank as if a question on which the result of the whole matter depended had been put to him in a court-room.
"Oh! certainly not, by no means," he faltered; "that is, I really don't know what to think."
"Nor I either," replied Wollnow curtly, putting the lamp on a table near the hall-door, and drawing back the bolt.
The light fell brightly upon the door, and as Wollnow opened it darkness yawned outside. Suddenly against the black background appeared a figure at the sight of which even the calm Wollnow trembled, while Brandow, who was directly behind him, staggered back with a low cry--the figure of a man, whose clothing was drenched with water and besmeared with sand and clay as if he had just risen from the earth, and whose pale face, framed in its dark beard and shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, was terribly disfigured by a narrow stream of blood which ran from his temple across his cheek.