Again a bright song resounded, accompanied by the waves breaking still louder on the shore.
Annoyed at the long stay, the Regierungsrath gave the signal to return home, and as they departed Eva could still hear the singer's merry words.
"Now ladies, away into the surging tide! Who would not wish to be a moonlight-water-fairy for once? I feel like a spirit of the elements, and my adorers have long since declared me to be an Undine, because in their opinion I have no soul. All the same--souls are the cheapest things in the world, and the smallest State has many hundreds of thousands of them! Besides, one must be able to exist without a soul, if one can only offer some substitute for it."
"Bravo!" cried Schöner; "long live our Undine!"
"Therefore, gentlemen, abonnement suspendu for the Baltic Sea? To-night it belongs to the ladies, and you return quietly to the hotel. You need have no fear that I shall transform myself down below in the breaking surf into a Melusina, and perhaps, coquette with a fish's tail. I am no silvery-scaled monster, but both on land and in water a woman comme il faut. En avant, ladies! Here are no hearses as in Cranz; here one springs from the shore into the waves, and the only Actæon who plays the spy upon us is the moon! It shall have its horns; it will soon enter upon its last quarter!"
Ladies and gentlemen descended the Fuchs-spitze on separate paths.
Eva had not lost a word of the singer's speech; it caused her to shiver uncomfortably, and she wrapped herself more closely in her shawl.
"An intolerable party," said the Regierungsrath to his wife; "so bold, so impudent."
"I do not understand," replied she, "how young Doctor Schöner can find pleasure in it."
"I understand it quite well! It is just the society for such ill-regulated minds! He would never have been fitted for a political career; it is not that he has no head, but everything ferments and surges in him in wild confusion."