The old man did as parents are apt to do with children to whom they
have been over-indulgent. He affected to observe nothing of Undine's
strange behaviour, and was beginning to talk about something else.
But this the maiden did not permit him to do. 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:--