e--"

"When you have attained to a great, proud future," Zalika interrupted
him excitedly, "then go to your father and ask him if he dares to
despise you; he would bind you to the earth, but you have wings to fly
above it. He does not understand a nature like yours, and never will.
Will you destroy yourself for the sake of a mere word and be a slave
forever? Come with me, Hartmut, with me to whom you are all the world."

She led him slowly away, and he did not tear himself from her, but, as
she caressed him and called him fond names she felt that his going was
under protest, and that she had needed all her wiles to accomplish it. A
few minutes later the pond was deserted, mother and son had disappeared,
and even the sound of their retiring footsteps had died out in the night
air. Over the moor moved only that weird, spectral life. The flashing
lights appeared and sank again in restless play,--mysterious breaths of
flame from the deep.

CHAPTER III.

It was autumn again, and the warm, golden light of a September day lay
upon the woodland, which stretched away like a green ocean as far as eye
could reach.

Hill and valley alternated with each other, all forest clad, and many a
mighty and moss-grown trunk in that great wilderness told of the forest
primeval which in the early days had covered all this part of South
Germany. Elsewhere in the land, railways had been built, until there was
scarcely a hamlet whose slumbers were undisturbed by the shrill scream
of the locomotive--but "the forest," as the people called it, remained
apart, cut off from the world, a vast territory many miles in width,
like a great, green island, unmoved by the waves of commotion and
progress from without.

Here and there amid the forest green a little village peeped out, or an
old castle reared its gray and weather-beaten battlements on high, as if
protesting against its impending decay. There was but one building in
the whole region which yet stood strong, intact and massive,
notwithstanding it was gray with age.

It was called Fuerstenstein, and was originally built as a hunting box,
for the use of the sovereign. The duke's head forester occupied it all
the year round; and during the hunting season some members of the ducal
family always held court there for several weeks. It had been built in
the early part of the last century, with the lavish waste of room which
marked the style of that period. Standing on a high elevation, it