your danger if my jealousy were really
aroused. Why can I not go to her? Is it you who stand in my way?"

"I do not know by what right you probe my heart," said Minna, calm
in appearance, but inwardly terrified. "Yes, I love him," she said,
recovering the courage of her convictions, that she might, for once,
confess the religion of her heart. "But my jealousy, natural as it is
in love, fears no one here below. Alas! I am jealous of a secret feeling
that absorbs him. Between him and me there is a great gulf fixed which
I cannot cross. Would that I knew who loves him best, the stars or I!
which of us would sacrifice our being most eagerly for his happiness!
Why should I not be free to avow my love? In the presence of death we
may declare our feelings,--and Seraphitus is about to die."

"Minna, you are mistaken; the siren I so love and long for, she, whom
I have seen, feeble and languid, on her couch of furs, is not a young
man."

"Monsieur," answered Minna, distressfully, "the being whose powerful
hand guided me on the Falberg, who led me to the saeter sheltered
beneath the Ice-Cap, there--" she said, pointing to the peak, "is not
a feeble girl. Ah, had you but heard him prophesying! His poem was the
music of thought. A young girl never uttered those solemn tones of a
voice which stirred my soul."

"What certainty have you?" said Wilfrid.

"None but that of the heart," answered Minna.

"And I," cried Wilfrid, casting on his companion the terrible glance of
the earthly desire that kills, "I, too, know how powerful is her empire
over me, and I will undeceive you."

At this moment, while the words were rushing from Wilfrid's lips as
rapidly as the thoughts surged in his brain, they saw Seraphita coming
towards them from the house, followed by David. The apparition calmed
the man's excitement.

"Look," he said, "could any but a woman move with that grace and
langor?"

"He suffers; he comes forth for the last time," said Minna.

David went back at a sign from his mistress, who advanced towards
Wilfrid and Minna.

"Let us go to the falls of the Sieg," she said, expressing one of those
desires which suddenly possess the sick and which the well hasten to
obey.

A thin white mist covered the valleys around the fiord and the sides
of the mountains, whose icy summits, sparkling like stars, pierced the
vapor and gave it the appearance of a moving milky way. The sun was
visible through the haze like a globe of red fir