“Oh! I know it now, but, alas! too late. She is gone!” replied Conrad; and the word gone sounded through the room with long-drawn pathos. ’Twas as if his voice had passed the word on to other voices, who kept repeating: “Gone! gone! gone!”
Here Moida and Ulrich fell to weeping; and when by and by they uncovered their faces, they were surprised to find that Conrad had disappeared. He must indeed have glided away like a spirit, for neither of them had heard his footstep; and, to their further wonder, the sunshiny curl had vanished too.
“How strangely things turn out!” spoke Moida to her betrothed one evening, as they were seated side by side at the foot of Loewenstein tower, watching the sun go down.
“Strangely, strangely!” answered Ulrich.
“Poor Conrad!” went on Moida. “Had he come back only a few days sooner—and he came with the full intention of proposing again—if he had arrived even one day before the saddest of all the days I have known, Walburga might have lived.”
To this the youth made no response; he could not speak, and his tears set Moida weeping again; while old Caro, who perceived that his mistress was in sorrow, let droop his head, and his tail ceased to wag. Presently the sun disappeared. But still in the twilight the lovers remained thinking of the past.
By and by a voice was heard singing within the tower, and after listening a moment and sighing, “Poor, poor Conrad!” Moida rose up and peeped through the lowest of the grated windows. Ulrich did the same, and what did they behold? Wrapped in a long, flowing gown, and pacing round and round the room, was Conrad Seinsheim. Yet not everybody would have recognized him; for his hair, which now reached down to his shoulders, was turned quite gray, and so was his beard, and you might have taken him for an aged man.
The song he was singing was one full of tenderness and love; and ever and anon Conrad would pause and listen, and press to his lips a lock of sunny hair.
Then suddenly, like a person who hears an answering voice, his ghostlike visage would glow with rapture, and you might have fancied he had caught a vision of heaven.