Roland and Manna held each other in a long embrace. There was a knock at the door, and they separated, looking at each other in dismay. They knew it was their father's knock, but neither of them said so. There was another rap, and they still were silent. Retreating footsteps were heard, and they knew their father's step. Both knew what it meant not to open when their father knocked, but each refrained from speaking of it.
Roland's thoughts must have gone from one person to the other, for he now said:—
"Herr von Pranken has advised me to enter the Papal army. O, if I only knew a battle-field where human brotherhood was to be fought for! O, if I knew where that was, how gladly would I die on it! But that cannot be won upon the field of battle. Oh, sister! I don't know what I'm thinking, what I'm saying. Hiawatha fasted, and we must fast too."
"Let us go home!" said Manna, finally.
"Home! home! What is home to us? What can be our home?"
Roland, however, rose up and went hand in hand with Manna through the meadow to the villa.
The sun shone bright, the hay exhaled so sweet a fragrance, the vessels were rushing up and down the stream, and just then a merry procession was moving towards them on the road; it was a so-called harvest mummery. On a cask sat the second son of the Huntsman crowned as Bacchus with vine-leaves; around him stood maidens clad in white, with dishevelled hair; they were swinging jugs, shouting and rejoicing. On the horses rode shapes disguised with moss.
Everybody was shouting and screaming amidst the loud report of fire-arms.
Brother and sister stood and gazed after the merry train, which disappeared behind the trees, and each knew the other's thoughts. Yes, all others can be merry, but we! They went on farther, and at last Roland said:—
"I know not how it is with me, I feel as if I were not really experiencing all this; I am only dreaming of it, and looking at it like a departed spirit. Everything is so distant, so inacessible, so dim, so shadowy. When I look upon you, I feel all the time that we cannot approach each other at all, that there lies between us a dreadful immensity of distance, and father—mother!"