The night came down quickly, and the stars shed a faint light over the tall, leafless branches.  Yesterday the first snow storm of the season had come, and everything as far as eye could reach was enveloped in an icy mantle.  The great level park before the castle was knee deep with snow, and the broad branches of the fir trees bent to the earth with their heavy white burden.  The stars came out one by one and dotted the heavens with their clear, quiet light, while far to the north a faint rosy glow tinted the distant horizon like a first morning greeting in the eastern sky.  But it was night, a cold, icy winter night, upon which no gleam of a new day could have fallen.

Hartmut’s eyes rested on the distant shimmer, but he heeded not its light; all was dark and gloomy within him this night.  He had not spoken to Adelheid von Wallmoden since the memorable day in the forest, until he met her to-day walking beside her bleeding and unconscious husband, whom they were bearing to his death bed.  The moment forbade everything but action, and Rojanow had not attempted to enter the sick room, but had waited outside for the physician’s reports.  Neither had he showed himself when Frau von Eschenhagen appeared, but he had spoken later with Herr von Schoenau and Willibald.  Now all was over, Herbert von Wallmoden was no longer numbered among the living, and his wife, his widow, was free!

Hartmut breathed heavily at this thought, but it brought him no joy.  His feelings were changed since that hour when he had staked his all and lost, for he loved this woman now, madly.  This sudden death had showed him the chasm which yawned between them, a chasm no less because Adelheid’s marriage bonds were broken.  Her aversion had been for the man who believed in nothing, and to whom nothing was sacred, and that man was as great a scoffer, as great an unbeliever to-day as ever.

He had pleaded for forgiveness in the character to which he had given her name in “Arivana,” but that Ada had disappeared again in the heights above after giving her warning cry, leaving to their fate the creatures she had exhorted, with their earthly passionate hates and loves.  Hartmut Rojanow could not force the wild blood in his veins to run in quiet grooves, he could not bend to a life of strict and narrow duty, and he would not!  What were the use of all those gifts which he felt were his, if they did not lift him out of the old ruts, did not raise him above the duties and limits of the commonplace world?  He knew well that those great blue eyes urged him to follow the paths which he hated so bitterly, and which, he told himself over and over again, he could never take.

The rosy shimmer yonder over the forest had grown deeper as it mounted higher in the heavens.  Unmovable it shone in the north, mysterious, far and high—­the great northern light in its dawning splendor!