Wilke smiled with satisfaction. "Oh, Miss Effi, she's a trump," was about what he was thinking. But Effi laid the paper bundle in the centre of the quickly gathered up tablecloth and said: "Now let all four of us take hold, each by a corner, and sing something sorrowful."
"Yes, Effi, that is easy enough to say, but what, pray, shall we sing?"
"Just anything. It is quite immaterial, only it must have a rime in 'oo;' 'oo' is always a sad vowel. Let us sing, say:
'Flood, flood,
Make it all good.'"
While Effi was solemnly intoning this litany, all four marched out upon the landing pier, stepped into the boat tied there, and from the further end of it slowly lowered into the pond the pebble-weighted paper bundle.
"Hertha, now your guilt is sunk out of sight," said Effi, "in which connection it occurs to me, by the way, that in former times poor unfortunate women are said to have been thrown overboard thus from a boat, of course for unfaithfulness."
"But not here, certainly."
"No, not here," laughed Effi, "such things do not take place here. But they do in Constantinople and it just occurs to me that you must know about it, for you were present in the geography class when the teacher told about it."
"Yes," said Hulda, "he was always telling us about such things. But one naturally forgets them in the course of time."
"Not I, I remember things like that."