Page:Undine.djvu/176

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112
UNDINE

a certain mistrust at their passengers; while even the servants began to have forebodings and watched their masters with suspicious glances.

Huldbrand would often say to himself: "Certès, like should only wed with like; this cometh of an union with a mermaid!" And making excuses for himself, as we are all wont to do, he would bethink him: "I knew not in truth that she was a sea-maiden; mine is the misfortune that all my life is let and hindered by the freaks of her mad kindred. It is no fault of mine!" Such thoughts seemed to hearten him; yet, on the other hand, his ill-humour grew and he felt something like animosity against Undine. She, poor thing, understood well enough what his angry looks signified. One evening, exhausted with these outbursts of ill-temper, and her constant efforts to frustrate Kühleborn's devices, she fell into a deep slumber, rocked soothingly by the gentle motion of the boat.

But hardly had she closed her eyes, when every one on board saw, wherever he turned, a horrible human head. It rose out of the waves, not like that of a person swimming, but perfectly perpendicular, as though kept upright on the watery surface, and floating along in the same course as the boat. Each man wanted to point out to his fellow the cause of his alarm, but each found on other faces the same horror–only that his neighbour's hands and eyes were turned in a different direction from that where the