"So the young Harfink has robbed him of his senses?" she murmurs interrogatively.
"So it seems!"
"Poor Felix!--I was very hard to him--I dared not be otherwise. I fear, I fear it is all in vain--he will yield. You have the same thought!"
"To dissuade any obstinate man is hard, but sometimes at least successful--to dissuade a weak man is quite easy, but always unsuccessful," replies Erwin. "Nevertheless let us hope."
"Concerning Felix, hope fails," said Elsa. "O Erwin, Erwin, often it seems to me that father had no right to persuade him to live at that time!"
IV.
Felix rode home.
It was a moonlight night, but none of those which remind one of theatre scenery and silver-flecked green paint, such, as painted in oil, endanger all German art societies; the objects did not float in that universal green-black indistinctness; on the contrary, they stood out in sharp relief.
The tall poplars and the short bushy grass at the edge of the road, the yellow fields of grain with their dark piles of sheaves, the pale flowers in the ditches, the red and black roofs of a distant village sleeping between green lindens, a round church cupola and a cemetery with its low, white wall, and the dark rows of crosses and monuments--all could be seen plainly, only with somewhat faded colors, and over all was a misty veil like thin smoke, and a white light shone on the poplar leaves, rustling and turning in the night wind. The reapers were still working. Through the mild air sounded their song, hollow and monotonous, with the quiet sadness which characterizes Slavonian folk-songs. Their scythes sparkle in the moonlight; occasionally the pleasant face of a young woman, nodding to a youth, rises before Felix's eyes from the crowd of workers, irradiated by the mystic half light.
Felix watched them as he slowly rode on. He would gladly have been one of them, and would have taken upon himself all their burdens in exchange for the one he bore. He could have wished that the night had been less beautiful, that a dead, winter stillness had prevailed around him instead of this strange charm of the mild July moonlight.