as ours. That he has been my lover--my beloved--heart of my
heart--thine own existence is the living proof; and something--an
intangible something--tells me that the rest of his prophecy will
likewise be fulfilled. We have known the sorrow--aye, as few others
have--and even now I feel that we shall also know death!

"It is because of this curious presentiment of mine that I write down
for thee, my baby--my baby Paul--this story of thy father and thy
mother, and the great love that gave thee to the world. It is but right,
before thou comest into thy kingdom, that thou shouldst know--thou and
thou alone--the secret of thy birth, that thou mayst carry with thee
into the big world thy birthright--the sweetness of a supreme love."

Then briefly, but as completely and vividly as the story could be
written, she pictured for him the beautiful idyl she and her lover had
lived, here in this very spot, two-and-twenty years ago; told him, in
her own quaint words, of the beautiful boy she had found in Lucerne,
that glorious May so long ago, and how it had been her caprice to waken
him, until the caprice had become her love, and afterwards her life;
told him how she had seen the danger, and had warned the boy to leave
Lucerne, while there was yet time, but that he had answered that he
would chance the hurt, because he wished to live, and he knew that only
she could teach him how--only she could prove to him the truth of her
own words, that _life was love!_

She told how weary and unhappy she had been, picturing with no light
fingers the misery of her life--married when a mere child to a vicious
husband--and all the insults and brutality she was forced to endure; and
then, for contrast, told him tenderly how she had been young again for
this boy she had found in Lucerne.

There was not one little detail of that idyllic dream of love omitted
from the picture she drew for him of these two--and their sublime three
weeks of life on the Buergenstock with their final triumphant, but bitter
culmination in Venice. She told him of what they had been pleased to
call their wedding--the wedding of their souls--nor did she seek to
lessen the enormity of their sin.

She touched with the tenderest of fingers upon the first dawn in their
hearts of the hope of the coming of a child--a child who would hold
their souls together forever--a child who would immortalize their love
till it should live on, and on, and on, through countless generations
pe