“Who is his second?  Or let me say, rather, whom will he bring along?”

“That was what worried him most after he had recovered himself.  He mentioned two or three noblemen of the vicinity, but dropped their names, saying they were too old and too pious, and that he would telegraph to Treptow for his friend Buddenbrook.  Buddenbrook came and is a capital man, at once resolute and childlike.  He was unable to calm himself, and paced back and forth in the greatest excitement.  But when I had told him all he said exactly as you and I:  ’You are right, it must be.’”

The coffee came.  They lighted their cigars and Wuellersdorf again sought to turn the conversation to more indifferent things.  “I am surprised that nobody from Kessin has come to greet you.  I know you were very popular.  What is the matter with your friend Gieshuebler?”

Innstetten smiled.  “You don’t know the people here on the coast.  They are half Philistines and half wiseacres, not much to my taste.  But they have one virtue, they are all very mannerly, and none more so than my old Gieshuebler.  Everybody knows, of course, what it is about, and for that very reason they take pains not to appear inquisitive.”

At this moment there came into view to the left a chaise-like carriage with the top down, which, as it was ahead of time, drove up very slowly.

“Is that ours?” asked Innstetten.

“Presumably.”

A moment later the carriage stopped in front of the hotel and Innstetten and Wuellersdorf arose to their feet.  Wuellersdorf stepped over to the coachman and said:  “To the mole.”

The mole lay in the wrong direction of the beach, to the right instead of the left, and the false orders were given merely to avoid any possible interference.  Besides, whether they intended to keep to the right or to the left after they were beyond the city limits, they had to pass through the “Plantation” in either case, and so their course led unavoidably past Innstetten’s old residence.  The house seemed more quiet than formerly.  If the rooms on the ground floor looked rather neglected, what must have been the state upstairs!  The uncanny feeling that Innstetten had so often combatted in Effi, or had at least laughed at, now came over him, and he was glad when they had driven past.

“That is where I used to live,” he said to Wuellersdorf.

“It looks strange, rather deserted and abandoned.”

“It may be.  In the city it was called a haunted house and from the way it stands there today I cannot blame people for thinking so.”

“What did they tell about it?”

“Oh, stupid nonsense.  An old ship’s captain with a granddaughter or a niece, who one fine day disappeared, and then a Chinaman, who was probably her lover.  In the hall a small shark and a crocodile, both hung up by strings and always in motion, wonderful to relate, but now is no time for that, when my head is full of all sorts of other phantoms.”