In trembling accents, now beginning and now breaking off again, they related to each other their struggles with themselves and with the world around them, and they recognized each other's purity and truthfulness of soul; and in proportion as Manna had hitherto closed her heart to Eric, the whole fountain of her love now welled up and overflowed.
As they stood with hands clasped, Eric said,—
"O Manna, how I wish you could be so happy as to see your own look."
"And you yours. Everyone who sees and knows you must love you. How then can I help it, who see and know you as nobody else can?"
They kissed each other with closed eyes, and over them the trees rustled in the gentle breeze of evening.
On that bench where he had once sat with Bella, Eric now sat by Manna's side, and a thrill passed through him as he thought of that time. He shrank from the recollection. With love's penetrating glance Manna noticed the passing emotion, and asked:—
"Have you too had to wrestle and struggle so sorely, before you saw and acknowledged that it must be?"
"Ah, let us not recall it; care and trouble, conflict and struggle, will be sure to come. Now is the marriage of our spirits; there must be no other thought, no discordant tone. We are blessed, twice blessed. I know that you are mine as I am yours. It must be so."
They embraced; and as she cried, "O, Eric, I. could bear you in my arms over all the mountains!" He saw subdued in her a wild, lawless, passionate strength of nature, such as a daughter of Sonnenkamp must inherit.
No one who had seen the modest, humble, gentle child of the morning could have believed that she could become so impassioned. Eric felt himself taken possession of by a stronger power.