more powerful than you have offered me far more."

"Thou hast no soul," he cried,--"no soul, if thou art not persuaded by
the thought of comforting a great man, who is willing now to sacrifice
all things to live beside thee in a little house on the shores of a
lake."

"But," she said, "I am loved with a boundless love."

"By whom?" cried Wilfrid, approaching Seraphita with a frenzied
movement, as if to fling her into the foaming basin of the Sieg.

She looked at him and slowly extended her arm, pointing to Minna, who
now sprang towards her, fair and glowing and lovely as the flowers she
held in her hand.

"Child!" said Seraphitus, advancing to meet her.

Wilfrid remained where she left him, motionless as the rock on which
he stood, lost in thought, longing to let himself go into the torrent
of the Sieg, like the fallen trees which hurried past his eyes and
disappeared in the bosom of the gulf.

"I gathered them for you," said Minna, offering the bunch of
saxifrages to the being she adored. "One of them, see, this one," she
added, selecting a flower, "is like that you found on the Falberg."

Seraphitus looked alternately at the flower and at Minna.

"Why question me? Dost thou doubt me?"