The girl was conducted to the fisherman's cottage.
Miranda, when she heard the news, fell into a swoon. How she had cautioned Eva against spending an evening on the sea; the latter had escaped secretly in order to indulge her unhappy love for the ocean.
The Räthin acknowledged this when she had recovered again, and Blanden and Wegen could hardly protect the idiot girl from the gigantic lady's maltreatment, who felt constrained to let her boundless excitement vent itself upon some victim or other.
A rural policeman chanced to be stopping just before the inn; he was summoned in order to take Kätchen with him to the district town to undergo what certainly promised to be a futile examination, because only seldom did a sudden gleam of light flash through her obscured mind.
Then Miranda, whose anguish indeed needed some outlet for its anger, turned with the most unjust reproaches upon Blanden, who, by his recklessness, had plunged mother and daughter into ruin, and had put both into the pillory before the whole of Neukuhren, before the capital, and before the entire Province; Eva had become ill in consequence of that disgrace, and since her illness had not been able to cast off a state of intense melancholy. Kätchen certainly should be arrested, but who knows if not she, but others, for whom there were no policemen, were perhaps the murderers of her unhappy child?
Blanden left the ignoble woman who, like hundreds of others, had transformed herself into a Megæra, when, in the heat of excitement, the lacquer of the gloss of cultivation melts away from them; yet he left her with a dagger in his heart! Was she right, could Eva have taken her own life? But no word of farewell, not a line indicated such a thing.
Must he be accountable for the victim whom the sea had swallowed up?
Who should solve that mystery?
Blanden stared at the storm that now discharged itself with terrific blows, and ignited an old Perkunos oak upon the height, like a beacon for ships in danger.
In his heart surged a tempestuous, agitated uproar, as great as the conflict of the elements without.