“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 fire.  Though winter still lingered, puffs of warm air laden with the scent of the birch-trees, already adorned with their rosy efflorescence, and of the larches, whose silken tassels were beginning to appear,—­breezes tempered by the incense and the sighs of earth,—­gave token of the glorious Northern spring, the rapid, fleeting joy of that most melancholy of Natures.  The wind was beginning to lift the veil of mist which half-obscured the gulf.  The birds sang.  The bark of the trees where the sun had not yet dried the clinging hoar-frost shone gayly to the eye in its fantastic wreathings which trickled away in murmuring rivulets as the warmth reached them.  The three friends walked in silence along the shore.  Wilfrid and Minna alone noticed the magic transformation that was taking place in the monotonous picture of the winter landscape.  Their companion walked in thought, as though a voice were sounding to her ears in this concert of Nature.

Presently they reached the ledge of rocks through which the Sieg had forced its way, after escaping from the long avenue cut by its waters in an undulating line through the forest,—­a fluvial pathway flanked by aged firs and roofed with strong-ribbed arches like those of a cathedral.  Looking back from that vantage-ground, the whole extent of the fiord could be seen at a glance, with the open sea sparkling on the horizon beyond it like a burnished blade.