"Yes," replied Kurt; "and to know her and love her was one and the same thing; nay, I may say, without the slightest exaggeration, that she was one 'whom to look at was to love.' One evening, I saw her at a party. I had been visiting at the house for some time, and I think I was rather fond of Augusta von Palm, who is staying here now, and with dear Agatha I was on terms of heartiest friendship; but Agatha; wishing to give me a surprise, had not told me of Erna's visit. So I saw her quite unexpectedly among the other young ladies. It would be quite bootless for me to try and describe what went on in my heart. So, I thought afterwards, the men must have felt of whom the Bible tells us that they were held worthy of beholding some divine apparition. My breath failed me; all the others present seemed to vanish from my sight; I saw only her, or, properly speaking, not her, only her eyes. It seemed like a double stream of unearthly, transcendent light; and again it was a stream which bore me resistlessly onward and upward into realms of bliss, whereof but an hour before I had known nought, divined nought, and which yet were, I felt clearly, my true home, to which I was soon returning after much aimless wandering in far off regions."
The young man's voice quivered. He drained the glass which, before, his lips had scarcely touched. Bertram filled it afresh. Kurt never saw how his hand shook as he poured out the wine, nor observed how curiously veiled the voice was in which Bertram, breaking the pause, said--
"Strange, or perhaps less strange than highly gratifying, that at least for once I find, this kindling effect of Love's divine flash confirmed in reality, of which the poets of all times and in all climes have sung in praise. I am almost ashamed to confess that although I do not think I am a hopelessly prosaic individual, I have always thought this but a fond and fair dream."
"And it is a dream," Kurt made answer, "inasmuch as things real are most curiously shifted and changed in it, and as one can give scarcely a clearer account than a somnambulist, of what occurs and of what one does one's self. I do not remember how I got home that night; I have no idea whether it was several days after, or really on the day following, that, during a picnic in the country, I was strolling apart from the rest by her side through a leafy grove. The light of the dying sun was trembling among the trees, and a few subdued notes of birds' song were heard. Silence was all around; and in silence we passed on, side by side. Sometimes she stooped to gather a flower for the tiny bunch which she held in her hand, and once, as she stooped again, and I wished to anticipate her, our hands touched; and, startled, we both looked up, looked into each other's eyes, and the flowers dropped from her hands, and--well, it was just a dream, a brief and blissful dream. Who can tell the story of a dream?"