She put out a small, soft white hand to him, which Reinhold touched with a feeling of awe.
"Just what he said," she murmured as though speaking to herself. "Strong and manly--a good, a true hand."
She let go his hand, and they walked on side by side, she by the railing again, feeling the rails, he close to her side, never turning his eyes from her.
"Did Anders tell you that too?" he asked.
"Yes; but your hand would have told me without that. I know people by their hands. Justus's hand is not so strong, though he works so much; but it is as good."
"And as true," said Reinhold.
Cilli shook her head with a laugh, that was as sweet and soft as the twittering of the swallows.
"No, no," said she, "not as true! He cannot be, for he is an artist; so he can have but one guiding star--his Ideal--that he must look up to and follow, as the kings followed the star in the East, which going before them stopped at Bethlehem over the house in which the Saviour was laid in a manger; but beyond that he must be free, free as the birds in the branches overhead, free to come and go, free to flit and flutter and sing to his heart's content."
They had reached the end of the railing. Before them stood the house in which Cilli lived. She rested the tips of her fingers upon the iron pillars which ended the railing, and raised her face with a strange dreamy expression on it.
"I often wish I were an artist," said she; "but I should like better still to be a sailor. Sometimes I have wonderful dreams, and then I fly over the earth on wide-spread wings. Below me I see green meadows and dark forests, and corn-fields waving their golden grain; silver streamlets wander down the hill-sides and mingle their waters in the broad rivers which glitter in the light of the sun as it sinks to the horizon. And as it sinks, and the waters, with the church spires reflected in them, take a rosy hue, a terrible anguish overwhelms me, as I feel that it will sink before I can see it--this sun which I have never seen, of which all I know is that it is above all things beautiful and great and glorious. And when the sun is so low that in another moment it must disappear, there lies before me, boundless, illimitable, the great ocean! It is impossible to describe what I feel then, but I fancy it must be what the dead feel when they rise to everlasting joy, or what great and good men feel when they have done the deed which renders them immortal."