"If I am with you!--How can you ask that question again?" replied his young wife, somewhat reproachfully.
"Yes, with me, your headstrong Egbert, who will not always have time to devote even to you, when he once again becomes immersed in work. On our wedding-trip I have belonged to you alone: then we could dream our fairy-dreams; but now come earnest workdays with their duties and cares, and often enough will they call me from your side. Will you understand how that is, Cecilia? Hitherto you have stood so far aloof from all this."
He looked upon his wife with a certain uneasiness, but the response that he met in her eyes was cheerful and reassuring.
"Well, then, I must learn to take part in your cares and duties. Will you teach me how, Egbert? But what do you know of fairy-dreams, you man of stern reality, that you are? Where did you learn about them?"
Runeck's eye swept over the mountain range until it rested upon the distant, solitary peak, from the summit of which, glittering in sunlight, greeted them a cross--the symbol of the Whitestone.
"Up there," said he, softly, "when the forest made music around us and the voice of the bells came up from below. Oh, that was a trying hour--a horrible one for you, my poor wife. Pitilessly I had to arouse you, acquainting you with the unreality of your future, and crumbling into ruins the gay, glittering world, in which you had hitherto lived--that I might point out to you the precipice on which you stood."
"Find no fault with that hour!" pleaded Cecilia, nestling up to his side. "Then I awoke, there I learned to see and to think. Do you know, Egbert," and a playful smile took the place of the gravity that had rested upon her features, "I never think of it without being reminded of the old legend of the caper-spurge, that cleaves the rock where buried treasures lie? At that time, you indeed, without any compassion at all, called out to me: 'The deep is empty and dead, and there are no longer any such things as hidden treasures!' And now----"
"Now, I have myself turned out to be a digger after buried treasures!" chimed in Egbert, while he stooped down and gazed into the dark, lustrous eyes of his young wife. "You are right, that was the hour in which I won you, in spite of everything.
"'I lifted out of night and gloom
That wondrous golden shrine,
And all its sparkling treasures
And all its gold are mine!'"
It was a few hours later; the reception and welcome to the Manor-house were over, and while Cecilia was still in the parlor chatting with Maia and Count Eckardstein, Dernburg went with Runeck out upon the terrace.