‘It cannot be undone,’ Greif answered gloomily. He dropped her wrist and began to walk slowly backwards and forwards in the shadow of the tower.
‘How could you do it! How could you do it!’ he repeated in a low voice, as though speaking to himself and without looking at her.
‘It was the only thing to be done,’ she answered firmly.
‘But the injustice of it—the illegality—what shall I call it?’ he stopped in his walk.
‘Call it what you please,’ replied Hilda scornfully. ‘It does not exist any more. It may not have been a legal act, but it was an act of justice, whatever you may say; of the truest justice, and I would do it again.’
‘Justice!’ exclaimed Greif bitterly. ‘If justice were done, I should be—’
‘Stop,’ said Hilda in a determined tone. ‘Justice is done and you are here, and you are what you were yesterday and shall be to-morrow, not for me only, but for the whole world. That is the only justice I can understand.’
‘Hilda, it is wrong,’ cried Greif. ‘I know it is. I have no right to throw off what has been brought upon me, what is proved so clearly—it is a wrong and a great wrong, and it must be repaired.’
‘A wrong to whom?’ Hilda asked, with flashing eyes. ‘Whose would your fortune be if you renounced it for the sake of that thing I have destroyed? It would be my mother’s—mine, would it not? The letter said so. And the name of Greifenstein, to whom would it go, if you proclaimed through the whole land that you had no right to it? To no one. It would end. No one would ever bear it, for no one has a right to dispose of it except, perhaps, my mother—’
‘Yes—your mother—’