"But what will Blanden say to that mother?"
"From what one hears, neither had anything wherewith to reproach themselves; he probably knows them; they moved in the same circles for some time."
"That is quite possible! All the same, it will be hard for me to point her out as the girl's mother; nor is it in truth, necessary, she has no longer any right over the girl. Should she, however, come to the betrothal, nothing will remain for us but to raise the veil. But where is Eva? The worst would be if we troubled our heads about matters which, indeed, exist nowhere but in our brains; day after day passes, and Blanden does not return."
While the married couple thus exchanged their anxieties and fears, their looks were suddenly arrested by a boat gliding over the sea.
The Regierungsrath had a perfect right to cough, because his telescope did not deceive him; it was Eva who, instead of reading and watering the flowers in the garden, let herself once again be rocked upon the ocean's waves, with the idiot fisherman's girl.
"A disobedient child," said the Regierungsräthin, annoyed; "there is something erratic about her; she does not belie her mother's blood."
"Yet her father, who died early, was an honourable man; he only committed the fault of trying to use a will-o'-the-wisp as a night-light."
"Fie, Kalzow."
"She is my sister, and yet she was not worthy of so good a man as the captain; from her youth upwards she was a strange creature, enthusiastically dreamy, often wild and eager for pleasure. Eva, fortunately, takes more after her father than her mother."
Meanwhile Eva had landed and wandered, singing, up the Fuchs-spitze.