Seraphitus looked at the blossom and then at Minna.
"Why do you question me thus? Do you doubt me?"
"No," said the girl, "my confidence in you is unbounded. While you are far more beautiful to me than this beautiful scenery, you also seem to me to be superior in intelligence to all the rest of humanity. When I have been with you, I seem to have communed with God. I only wish——"
"What?" asked Seraphitus, with a flashing look that revealed to the girl the vast distance that divided them.
"I wish I could suffer in your stead."
"This is the most dangerous of Thy creatures," thought Seraphitus. "Is it a criminal thought, O God, to long to present her to Thee?—Have you forgotten," he said aloud, "all I told you up there?" and he pointed upwards to the peak of the Ice-cap.
"Now he is terrible again!" thought Minna with a shudder.
The roar of the Sieg formed an accompaniment to the thoughts of these three beings, who stood together for a few minutes on a projecting slab of rock, parted, as they were, by immeasurable gulfs in the spiritual world.
"Teach me then, Seraphitus," said Minna, in a voice as silvery as a pearl and as gentle as the movements of a sensitive plant. "Teach me what I must do to avoid loving you? Who could fail to admire you? And love is the admiration that is never tired."
"Poor child!" said Seraphitus, turning pale, "only one Being can be loved thus."