"Our time no longer has need of an enchanter's wand. It has found another sort of one for splitting rocks and opening the earth--You see it, do you not?"
"Yes, indeed. I see bald destruction, rubbish and splintered quartz--but the treasures stay buried below."
"It is empty and dead below--there are no longer any buried treasures."
The answer had a harsh and joyless sound, and the tone in which it was spoken did not soften its asperity.
"Perhaps it is only because the magical word has been lost, without which the wand remains powerless," answered Cecilia lightly, without observing, apparently, his forbidding manner. "Do you not think so, Herr Runeck?"
"I think, Baroness Wildenrod, that the world of fairies and magicians has long been left behind us. We no longer comprehend it, and no longer want to comprehend it."
There was something almost menacing in these apparently insignificant words. Cecilia bit her lips, and through the sunny brightness of her smile there gleamed a flash of hostility from her eyes, but then she laughed gayly.
"How grim that sounds! The poor gnomes and dwarfs have a determined enemy, I perceive. Only hear, Eric, how your friend denounces the whole legendary world."
"Yes, it is not worth while to approach Egbert with such things," said Eric, who just now came up. "He has no opinion of poetry, either, that one cannot make by line and plummets, nor needs to draw plans for--therefore he regards it as a highly superfluous thing. I have not yet forgiven him for the way in which he took the news of my engagement--actually, with formal commiseration! And when I indignantly hurled at him the reproach that he knew nothing about love, nor cared to know it either--would you believe that I got for answer a frigid 'No.'"
Cecilia fixed her large, dark eyes upon the young engineer, and again that demoniacal spark flashed in them as she said smilingly: