Melitta smiled. "I am not as light as a doll."
"And I am not as weak as a girl of ten," answered Oswald, who seized Melitta around the waist, and lifting her up carried her safely, as the mother carries her child, on the last stones up to the edge of the forest, where the broad branches of the beeches gave shade and coolness. There he let her glide gently from his arms on the thick moss and remained standing before her. Melitta had no longer resisted as soon as the young man had boldly lifted her up; she felt very quickly that he was strong enough to carry her, and she thought it folly not to make the burden as easy as possible to him by clinging closely to his arms.
"How strong you are!" she said, now looking up at him with admiration.
Oswald's heart beat high, and his bosom rose, more from inner excitement than from the exertion. He still felt the elastic form which he had pressed in his arms, the soft hair playing around his face, and the sweet breath that had fallen upon his brow.
"Under such circumstances it would be difficult not to be strong," he said.
"But confess, it has tired you? Come and sit down here; there is room for more than two on this moss sofa."
Oswald sank down into the soft moss by the side of Melitta, who was leaning against the trunk of a beech-tree; he rested his head on his arm and looked thoughtfully in her cheerful face. Was the dream near the pond about to be fulfilled? Is the dear face about to bend down and to kiss him, as it did in the dream? Oswald was overcome by the strange feeling as if he had gone through all this once before; as if he knew the place from of old, the tall dark forest, from which came the pecking of a woodpecker, the meadow before him, with the red evening lights touching up the tall grass, the silent garden yonder, and from the green foliage the gray château of Melitta rising on high. He felt as if he had seen Melitta often in former years, as a boy, when he had been deep in a beautiful fairy tale, till at last the sweet princess stood bodily before him. And Melitta also must have felt something like it, for quite at her ease, as if he had been her brother or her husband, she took his hat off and pressed her delicate fragrant handkerchief repeatedly on his warm brow and on his blue dreamy eyes.
Oswald seized the white hand and pressed it to his lips.
"Your hand I must return, but the handkerchief I can really not give you back," he said.
"Then keep it as a souvenir of this hour. But now let us go on. It is quite a distance yet to the forest chapel, and the sky looks really threatening now."