"I have to confess to thee," Albrecht said at length; and the strangeness of his tone and of his address struck her with so deep an amazement that for the moment all her own fears were forgotten in wonder. "If thou canst forgive the wrong I have done thee—"
He broke off and bent forward in the darkness as if he would have kissed her. Then he drew back.
"Forgive thee?" stammered Erna, confused and amazed. "How hast thou wronged me?"
"If one should come," Albrecht said, his tone lower than before, "and should win thee and wed thee when thou knewest not what he was, or how unworthy, couldst thou forgive him if afterward he loved thee truly and more than tongue could tell?"
The fear of some horrible revelation came over her. She forgot that she had shrunk at his coming. The thought that she might have been deceived drove from her mind all recollection of her own fault. She sat up with sudden energy.
"Albrecht!" she exclaimed. "What is it that thou hast to tell me? Art thou not noble?"
"I have not lied to thee," he answered with a touch of bitterness amid his humility which did not escape her. "My father was indeed lord of the Neiderwasser valley."
"Then what hast thou to tell me?"
It was some moments before he answered, but then, with a voice full of passion and pain, he told her all that he had related to Father Christopher on the morning after the marriage. Erna listened with eyes wide stretched, as if she would pierce the darkness, her heart beating so that it seemed to her that it would suffocate her. It seemed a thing so impossible to understand that she had indeed wed a strange creature from the forest, and not a man at all, that at first she refused to believe it.
"If this were true," she said, "surely Father Christopher would have told me. He would not have suffered me to imperil my soul by such a union had it indeed been true that thou wert—Oh, Albrecht, thou surely art human! I should not love thee else."