"Three days.... Say you wanted to speak to me. That is enough. You are coming?"
"Yes; I will come."
She thrilled with pleasure. "I promise you," she said, "that I will no longer regard you as my bitterest enemy. That I will do my best to make you happy."
"It is not I you have to think of," he replied, "but Ulrich--will you make Ulrich happy?"
She shrank from him slightly. "Yes, I will," she said in a toneless voice.
Ten minutes later the white boat put off from the landing-place. Leo watched it from behind the bushes. She did not wave her hand in farewell, neither did she look round, and he felt grateful to her for it. When she landed on the opposite bank, it seemed to him as if she sank on the ground for a moment because she was either exhausted or crying.
He turned back to the temple deep in thought. The mist had quite dispersed, and so he was obliged to hang about the island, in hiding for another hour or more. Warm noontide sunlight lay on the lawn. Wasps with wide outspread wings floated humming about the blackberry clusters. A slow-worm crawled lazily over the half-dry pebbles. Now and then there came from the Halewitz fields a jocund cry, which slowly died away on the air. It was the ploughman working not far from the river.
Yonder lay his acres; his work, his happiness. Plagued by restlessness, he ran to and fro in front of the temple, the statues looking down on him indifferently with their frozen smile. The soft sandstone out of which they were sculptured had begun to decay. The full-blooming boys' faces had grown wrinkled, and were full of scars and pits, as if the leaves had rotted them. The arm of one was shattered as far as the elbow, and the stump projected from the upper part of the body like a post nailed into the flesh.
"We must get you restored, you poor fellow," he said, and drew himself erect with a broken-hearted sigh.