I wished to say more; to tell her all; to tell her that if I were to lose her by my decision, whatever else I might win by it seemed inexpressibly worthless to me; that----
"Paula!" I said once more, but I said it at her feet, with hot tears streaming from my eyes. I strove for words, but they would not come.
A soft hand passed gently over my hair, and it seemed to me--I was not sure then, nor am I now--but it seemed to me that she lightly touched my brow with her lips. Then I heard her voice, and its tone was calm, sweet and clear:
"George, my brother, you must not thus distress your poor sister. Now go and bid our mother farewell. She has long foreseen the approach of this moment, and has impatiently longed for it. In her lives, far more than in us, George, the spirit of the war for freedom. She knows, from her own experience, that a man must give up home and goods and wife and children, and all that is dear to him, to devote his life to a great and good cause. Come, George!"
CHAPTER X.
A lively breeze was blowing in my face as the carriage in which I was jolted along the road from Fährdorf to Zehrendorf, a bad one in the best of times, but now, in the spring, at its worst. The driver on the box had wrapped himself close in a horse-blanket and sat huddled together, while the strong horses had as much as they could do to drag the light vehicle through the deep miry ruts. It was about eight in the evening, and the moon was an hour high, but only from time to time did a glimpse of her disc peer out through the heavy clouds, throwing a deceitful light, quickly succeeded by darkness, over drenched fields and meadows, with pools of water glistening here and there over the wide expanse of barren heath.
And as lights and shadows chased each other over the wide expanse, so alternated in my soul the memories of joy and grief that I had experienced here. The days that I had spent here came all back, and passed by me with faces beaming with smiles, clouded by grief, or distorted with pain. And there were far fewer of the smiling days than of those with sad and gloomy looks; and at last--for during the whole journey it had seemed to me almost a wickedness that I should dare to return to this spot--this feeling overcame me so strongly that I could scarcely refrain from calling to the driver to stop, that I could go no further to-night.
"We shall reach the top directly," said the man, giving his tired horses a cut with the whip.
I do not know why he thought it necessary to offer me this consolation; perhaps he had thought that the groan which escaped me was extorted by the badness of the road.
But he was right. I knew that as well as he did. The light below us, which seemed to shine out of the earth, came from a little house leaning against the foot of the hill, and those broad white patches, which contrasted so singularly with the black hills, were the great chalk-quarries belonging to Prince Prora, to which the house belonged; and not far from us, on the ridge which we were slowly climbing, was a piece of woods--part of the same woods in which I fled from my pursuers for four days.