speak to you, and to you alone, Hartmut."

She stepped back again into the thicket and motioned him to follow.
Hartmut hesitated a moment. How came this heavily-veiled and
richly-attired stranger into the lonely wood, and why did she speak so
familiarly to him whom she had never seen before? But the mysteriousness
of her behavior beginning to charm him, he followed.

She stood now in the shadow of the low trees, where she could not be
seen from the lake, and slowly threw back her veil. She was not very
young, a woman of more than thirty, but her face with its great burning
eyes, possessed an indefinable witchery, and a certain charm lay in her
voice, which, though she talked in whispers, had a soft, deep tone, and
an odd intonation, as though the German which she spoke so fluently was
not her mother tongue.

"Hartmut, look at me. Do you really not know me any more? Does no memory
of your childhood come back to you, to tell you who I am?"

The young man shook his head slowly, and yet some dreamy and obscure
memory did come to his recollection, of having heard this voice before,
and of this face which had looked into his at some far distant period.
Half shy, half fascinated, he stood looking at this stranger, who
suddenly threw her arms around him.

"My son, my only child! Do you not know your own mother?"

"My mother is dead," he answered, half aloud.

The stranger laughed bitterly, shrilly, and her laugh seemed but an echo