"
She led him slowly away, and he did not tear himself from her, but, as
she caressed him and called him fond names she felt that his going was
under protest, and that she had needed all her wiles to accomplish it. A
few minutes later the pond was deserted, mother and son had disappeared,
and even the sound of their retiring footsteps had died out in the night
air. Over the moor moved only that weird, spectral life. The flashing
lights appeared and sank again in restless play,--mysterious breaths of
flame from the deep.
CHAPTER III.
It was autumn again, and the warm, golden light of a September day lay
upon the woodland, which stretched away like a green ocean as far as eye
could reach.
Hill and valley alternated with each other, all forest clad, and many a
mighty and moss-grown trunk in that great wilderness told of the forest
primeval which in the early days had covered all this part of South
Germany. Elsewhere in the land, railways had been built, until there was
scarcely a hamlet whose slumbers were undisturbed by the shrill scream
of the locomotive--but "the forest," as the people called it, remained
apart, cut off from the world, a vast territory many miles in width,
like a great, green island, unmoved by the waves of commotion and
progress from without.
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