'Our foes the rivers are more insidious than your mighty enemy the salt water,' she wrote to Romaris. 'The sea deals open blows, and men know what they must expect if they go out on the vasty deep. But here a little brook that laughed and chirped at noon-day as innocently as a child may become at nightfall or dawn a roaring giant, devouring all that surrounds him. We pay heavily for the glory of our mountain waters.'
These autumn weeks seemed very dreary to her. She visited her horses chafing at inaction in their roomy stalls, and attended to her affairs, and sat in the library or the octagon room hearing the rain beat against the emblazoned leaded panes, and felt the days, and above all the evenings, intolerably dull and melancholy. She had never heeded rain before, or minded the change of season.
One Sunday a messenger rode through the drenching storm, and brought her a telegram from her lawyer in Salzburg. It said: 'Idrac flooded: many lives lost: great distress: fear town wholly destroyed. Please send instructions.'
The call for action roused her as a trumpet sounding rouses a cavalry charger.
'Instructions!' she echoed as she read. 'They write as if I could bid the Danube subside, or the Drave shrink in its bed!'
She penned a hasty answer.
'I will go to Idrac myself.'
Then she sent a message also to S. Johann im Wald for a special train to be got in readiness for her, and told one of her women and a trusty servant to be ready to go with her to Vienna in an hour. It was still early in the forenoon.
'Are you mad?' cried Madame Ottilie, when she was informed of the intended journey.
Wanda kissed her hand.