She broke in upon him, "I have asked our kind guest from whence he has come among us, and he has not yet answered me." "I come out of the forest, you lovely little vision," Huldbrand returned; and she spoke again: "You must also tell me how you came to enter that forest, so feared and shunned, and the marvellous adventures you met with in it; for there is no escaping without something of this kind." Huldbrand felt a slight shudder on remembering what he had witnessed, and looked involuntarily toward the window, for it seemed to him that one of the strange shapes which had come upon him in the forest must be there grinning in through the glass; but he discerned nothing except the deep darkness of night, which had now enveloped the whole prospect.

Upon this he became more collected, and was just on the point of beginning his account, when the old man thus interrupted him: "Not so, sir knight; this is by no means a fit hour for such relations." But Undine, in a state of high excitement, sprang up from her little stool and cried, placing herself directly before the fisherman: "He shall NOT tell his story, father?
he shall not?
But it is my will:--he shall!--stop him who may!" Thus speaking, she stamped her little foot vehemently on the floor, but all with an air of such comic and good-humoured simplicity, that Huldbrand now found it quite as hard to withdraw his gaze from her wild emotion as he had before from her gentleness and beauty.

The old man, on the contrary, burst out in unrestrained displeasure.

He severely reproved Undine for her disobedience and her unbecoming carriage towards the stranger, and his good old wife joined him in harping on the same string.
By these rebukes Undine was only excited the more.

"If you want to quarrel with me," she cried, "and will not let me hear what I so much desire, then sleep alone in your smoky old hut!" And swift as an arrow she shot from the door, and vanished amid the darkness of the night.
Huldbrand and the fisherman sprang from their seats, and were rushing to stop the angry girl; but before they could reach the cottage-door, she had disappeared in the stormy darkness without, and no sound, not so much even as that of her light footstep, betrayed the course she had taken.