She felt within her a passion to which she could no longer blind herself; the fiery breath, with all its fierceness, was blowing down upon her. Now came the crucial-test.
"Leave me at once, Herr Rojanow--this instant," she said. The words had a choked, scarcely audible sound, and they were spoken to a man who was not accustomed to yield when he felt himself the victor. He would have gone closer to her--but something in the young wife's eye, in spite of all, kept him within bounds. But he spoke her name again, and in a tone whose power he best knew:
She shuddered, and made a protesting motion.
"Not that name. For you I am only Adelheid von Wallmoden. I am married; you know that."
"Yes, married to a man who is standing on the threshold of old age; who does not love you, and for whom you could feel no love even if he were younger. What does that cold, calculating diplomat know of love? The Court, his position, his advancement, is all in all to him; his wife is nothing. He exults over the possession of a treasure whom he knows not how to prize, and to whose happiness and peace he gives not a thought."
Adelheid's lips trembled. She knew only too well that all he said was true. She did not answer.
"And what binds you to this man?" continued Rojanow, coming closer. "A word, a single 'yes,' which you have spoken without knowing its significance, without knowing yourself. Shall you permit it to bind you for your whole life? Shall you allow it to make us both miserable for all time? No, Ada, love, that eternal, undying right of the human heart, must have its own. Men prate of guilt, others of destiny. It is destiny which is beckoning us to-day, and we must follow after. A feeble word cannot separate us."
At this moment a lightning flash parted the heavy, distant clouds, and cast a long, narrow, dazzling light over the great forest, and gleamed across Hartmut's face and figure where he stood.
Surely he was his mother's son now. He never looked more like her than at this moment, with his dark, destroying beauty, and his peculiar, passionate, demoniacal glance. Perhaps it was this glance which brought Adelheid to her senses, perhaps it was the something concealed behind all the fire and passion.