nobody was near, and the corner of the shed hid us in a three-cornered shadow.
We left it at last. I wanted to take her farther out along the river, but she did not like the darkness, and wanted to go towards the town. "We can be reasonable," she said. But our words were not so much talk as translated caresses.
We walked slowly arm-in-arm on the broad quay towards the lights of the town, which, like scattered sparks, mounted towards the stars, and some distance ahead of us, against the bend of the river, culminated in a golden border inlaid with the green enamel of the hotel gardens. On the opposite bank nothing was to be seen but two coloured signal lamps, and the dark mass of rock only showed as a starless part of the sky.
The express tore past on the other side of the river, and reminded us of the time. But just now the light in front of us began to brighten with a mother-of-pearl-like shade, and under the clearing the dark bend of a mountain appeared. The masts of a couple of Elbe rafts showed against the sky. The glare quickly became redder, as if from a fire; had one been near the Rhine, one would have imagined it to be Brünhilde's rock ablaze, mounting like a glowing dome over Winterberg's even wood-stretches, just where the depression midway silhouetted itself. A few minutes afterwards the moon floated free, growing ever less golden and more crystalline over the mountain landscape with its river band, a scene which it seemed to create out of the chaos of the night and gradually bring to perfection.
It was too beautiful for us to think of parting. We kept on going backwards and forwards along the river, from the little lonely waiting-shed until we came so close
