There followed a long, oppressive pause.  Hartmut did not answer, but his head sank under the words of whose crushing significance the questioner had no knowledge, while his eyes seemed to pierce the ground.

“No,” he said at last, slowly.

“But you have the memory of him and of your mother?”

“My mother!” Rojanow broke forth wildly now.  “Do not speak of her, in this hour—­do not speak to me of my mother.”

It was an alarming cry, a mixture of boundless bitterness, with reproach and despair.  In it the mother was sentenced by her son, he felt her memory was but a desecration of this hour.

Adelheid did not understand him, she only saw that she had touched on a point which admitted of no discussion, but she also saw that the man who stood before her with his deep, dark glance, with his tone of despair, was another than he who had stood there a quarter of an hour before.  It was a dark, fathomless mystery upon which she gazed, but she had no longer any fear.

“Let us end this interview,” she said, earnestly.  “You will seek no second one, I believe that; but one word more before we part.  You are a poet.  I have felt that in spite of everything, as I have learned to know your work.  But poets are teachers of mankind, and can lead to good or to ill.  The wild flame of your ‘Arivana’ springs from a life which you, yourself, seem to hate.  Look yonder,” and she pointed to the distant heavens inflamed now with the lightning’s play.  “Those are also flaming brands, but their beginnings are from above and they point out another way—­and now farewell!”

Long after she had disappeared, Hartmut stood on the same spot as if rooted to the ground.  He had answered no word, made no comment, only gazed where she had pointed, with fixed, hopeless eyes.

Flash after flash of lightning was now rending the heavens and the whole landscape was enveloped in a lurid glare which reflected itself in that little sheet of water so like the Burgsdorf fish pond; the long reeds and grasses swayed and bent above the water and the mist from the meadow rose above it all.

Under just such long, waving grass the boy had lain long ago and dreamed of the day when he should mount like the falcon from which his race had taken their name, always higher and higher into boundless freedom toward the sun, and now on a similar spot the sentence had fallen upon him like a judgment from heaven, and the will-o’-the-wisp on this lowering autumn night seemed in its spectral flashes to dance over the grave of false hopes and falser aspirations.  The falcon had not mounted to the skies, the earth had held him fast.  He had felt for some time that the intoxicating cup of freedom and of life which his mother’s hand had poured for him was poisoned; there were for him no cherished memories to guard—­he dare not venture to think of his father.

Darker and darker grew the heavens with their heavy, storm laden clouds, and wilder and fiercer was the struggle between those giant figures which were riven at every flash only to come together again with greater fury, and brighter and more vivid grew that mighty flame as it mounted higher and higher in the inky firmament.