He paused. "Fräulein von Eberstein?"
"Are you not very slightly related to the Freiherr Friedrich Wehlenberg of Bernewitz? A very distant relative, I mean."
"Not the most distant connection. I invented in a hurry a name that sounded like my own, and I never dreamed that it belonged to any one in reality."
"Then papa never will forgive you," Gerlinda declared in a tone of despair. "You can never come again to the Ebersburg."
"Do you, then, still wish me to come?" asked Hans.
She was silent, but her eyes filled with tears, and this disarmed the young man's irritation. It was not the poor child's fault that she had been brought up so ridiculously. He slowly approached her again, and said, gently, "Are you very angry with me for my foolish jest? I meant no harm."
Gerlinda did not reply, but she allowed him to take her hand, and she listened as he went on in the same tone: "Herr von Eberstein is greatly attached, I know, to his family traditions, and no one could require him, at his age, to resign what has been life to him for so long; he belongs, body and soul, to the past. But you, Fräulein von Eberstein, are just entering upon life, and in the nineteenth century we must adapt ourselves to the spirit of the age and see things as they are. Do you remember what I said to you on the castle terrace?"
"Yes," was the scarcely audible reply.
Hans leaned towards her, and his voice had the same cordial, sincere tone as on that sunny morning. "Around you, too, prejudices and traditions have grown like a thorny hedge, tall and dense. Would you dream away existence behind it? Perhaps a time will come when you will have to make a choice between a dead past and a bright sunlit future: should that time ever come, choose well!"
He carried the trembling little hand, still lying in his own, to his lips, and several moments passed before he released it; then he bowed and left the room.