to
weary you so soon. You can make your visit alone."

"I'll admit I'm not a poet like you, who can muse and dream all day
long," said Egon laughing. "For a full week we have led hermits' lives,
but I cannot live on sunshine, woody odors and Stadinger's sermons any
longer. I must see my fellow-men, and the head forester is the only
gentleman in the neighborhood; and besides, Herr von Schoenau is a
splendid, jolly fellow. You will like him when you meet him."

He jumped into the carriage, waved a parting greeting to his friend, and
was off. Rojanow looked after him until the vehicle had disappeared
behind the trees, then he turned and struck into a path which led into
the forest.

He carried a gun over his shoulder, but his thoughts were not bent on
sport. He went on heedlessly, with no idea of direction, and with no
thought of the distance which he was putting between himself and Rodeck,
which was each moment becoming greater.

Prince Adelsberg was right when he said he knew this wild, mountain
scenery was to his friend's taste. The very air had for him a certain
sorcery. He stood still at last and took some long, deep breaths, but
the cloud on his brow had not yet disappeared; it grew darker instead,
as he leaned against a tree and cast his eyes around him.

The beauty of the sunny, autumn day, the picturesqueness of the grand
old wood, could not bring to this handsome, joyless face one expression
of peace or content.

He saw this country for the first time; his boyhood's home lay far to
the north, and yet this place, so different from his father's birthplace
and his own, brought back the past with all its painful recollections,
and awakened anew within him feelings he had thought long dead and
buried. Feelings and thoughts which had never troubled him during the
long years in which by land or sea, he had drunk of that freedom for
which he had sacrificed so much.

The old German woods! They whispered here in the South, just as they had
done in the North; the same wind moved the branches of the fir and the
oak, and whistled through the tops of the distant pine trees. Yes, these
were the self-same voices which had once told all their secrets to the
willful boy lying on the mossy bank of the Burgsdorf fish pond.

There was a stir and sound as of some one moving between the trees.
Hartmut looked up indifferently, expecting to see an animal of some kind
spring out, but he saw instead the fluttering of a light gown