“Herbert, look!”

“At what?”

“At that stranger.  What a strange resemblance.”

“To whom?” asked Herbert, looking searchingly, too, into the face of the stranger, who was nearer them now.

“It’s impossible!  That is no passing resemblance.  It is he, himself,” cried his sister.

She sprang up pale with excitement, with her eyes fixed and staring at the young stranger, who was just putting his foot on the first step of the shaded veranda.  Now his eyes met hers, his large, dark, flaming eyes which had so often looked into her own and pleaded for him in his childhood, and all doubts vanished.

“Hartmut, Hartmut Falkenried!  You!”

She stopped suddenly, for Wallmoden laid his hand heavily, very heavily, on her arm, and said sharply:  “You are in error, Regine, we do not know this gentleman.”

Hartmut was startled, when, upon reaching the top step, he recognized Frau von Eschenhagen.  The lattice-work had prevented his recognizing her, and for her presence he was not prepared.  But at the very moment when he realized who it was, the ambassador’s words sounded in his ears.  He understood only too well what the tone and words implied and the blood rushed to his temples.

“Hartmut!” Frau Regine called again, looking uncertainly at her brother, who still held her arm fast.

“We do not know him,” he repeated in the same tone.  “Must I repeat it to you again, Regine?”

She understood his meaning now, and turned with a half-threatening, half-pained glance from the son of her old-time friend, as she said bitterly:  “You are right.  I was mistaken.”

Hartmut drew himself to his full height, and an angry look flashed across his face as he drew a step nearer.

“Herr von Wallmoden!”

“What is it?” answered the other in a sharp, but contemptuous tone.

“Your excellency has but forestalled me,” said Hartmut, forcing himself by mighty effort to speak quietly.  “I came to request you not to know me.  We are strangers to one another.”

Then he turned with a haughty, defiant air, and disappeared within the little inn.

Wallmoden looked after him with knitted brow, and then turned to his sister.  “Could you not have restrained yourself, Regine?  Why make a scene?  This Hartmut exists no more for us.”

Regine’s face showed clearly her intense excitement, and her lips trembled as she answered: 

“I am no such staid diplomat as you, Herbert.  I have not yet learned to be calm and indifferent when one whom I have for years imagined dead, or gone to ruin, suddenly springs up before me.”

“Dead?  He was too young to make that a probability.  Gone to ruin?  That is indeed possible, judging from his life lately.”

“What do you mean?” asked his sister excitedly.  “What do you know of his life?”

“I know something of it.  Falkenried is too dear to me to make me lose sight altogether of his son.  I have never mentioned what I knew to either of you.  But as soon as I returned to my post, ten years ago, I used my diplomatic position to ascertain what I could concerning them.”