e strokes Time's limit do teach thee,
Man, think of thy mortality."

"Life in your Germany is like a fairy tale," said Ada, after repeating
the verse to herself; "everything is so dreamy; so pervaded with
poetry."

"Then stay in our Germany, stay with us," he pleaded, softly, his voice
expressing far more than his words.

She shook her little head sorrowfully. "I came five years too late."

"Do not say that," replied Bergmann, pressing the bare arm which rested
on his closely to his side. "How old are you now?"

It did not occur to her to smile at the question or to answer it,
according to the ordinary custom of women, with an affected reply. She
said, instead, as simply as a child:

"Twenty-three."

"And at twenty-three would it be too late to seek and strive for
happiness in life? When sorrow has been experienced so young, it can
surely be regarded as a childish disease and there is nothing to be
done except to forget it as quickly as possible."

Ada gazed fixedly into vacancy, saying, as if lost in thought:

"No, no. That is not so. There are injuries which are incurable. The
mother of two children is old at twenty-three. Since she can no longer
offer a man the full happiness of love, she has no right to expect it
from him."

He was about to answer, but with a hasty movement she placed her
slender finger on her lip, saying:

"Hush! Not another word on this subject. Look"--and her hand pointed,
down to the park.

From a bow window in the castle a powerful apparatus was sending a
broad stream of electric light into the darkness. It often changed and
moved, being thrown now here, then there. In its course it illumined
the tops of the trees with a faint, livid phosphorescence, interwove
the shrubbery with fantastic gliding spots of light, and gave the turf,
wherever it was visible, the appearance of a strip of a glittering
glacier. In the distance, where the light was lost in the dense groups
of trees, it produced the illusion of indistinct shapes gleaming out
there for a moment and then vanishing. It seemed as if one could see
something mysterious moving or standing, perhaps a human form, wrapped
in floating robes, perhaps a white marble statue hidden behind the
foliage, perhaps a mist, gathering and scattering. Night moths and
bats, fluttering across the bar of light out of the darkness into the
darkness, shone brightly during the brief period of their passage, then
suddenly vanished