grown up to love her as naturally as he loved the pine-scented air of
his home, the warm soft sun, or the still beauty of the forest. Hilda
was an essential part of his life and being, without which he could
imagine no future. Year by year it grew harder to say good-bye, and the
happiness of meeting grew deeper and more real. There was a pride in
the knowledge that she was for him only, which played upon the
unconscious selfishness of his young nature and gave him the most
profound and exquisite delight. At three and twenty he was old enough
to understand the world about him, he had accomplished his year of
obligatory service in the army, and had come into contact with all
sorts of men, things and ideas. He was himself a man, and had outgrown
most boyish fallacies and illusions, but he had not outgrown Hilda. She
was there, in the heart of the forest, in the towers of Sigmundskron,
away from the world he had seen, and maidenly ignorant of all it
contained, waiting for him, the incarnation of all that was lovely, and
young, and fair, and spotless. He pitied his fellow-students, who loved
vulgarly whatever came into their way. He could not imagine what life
would be without Hilda. It was a strange sort of love, too, for there
had been no wooing; they had grown up for each other as naturally as
the song-bird for its mate. There had been no hindrances, no
jealousies, no alternate hopes and fears, none of those vicissitudes to
which love is heir. Nothing but the calamity of death could interfere
with the fulfilment of their happiness, and perhaps no two beings ever
loved each other from whom death seemed so far.

Hilda was happy, too, in her own way, for what she knew of the outer
world was what she saw through Greif's eyes. To him the greatest of all
blessings would be to come back to the forest and never to leave it
again, and Hilda argued that the world could not be worth seeing, if
the woods were so vastly preferable as he seemed to think. She felt