fore: you recognize what I might have
been; but I cannot be it now. Too late!"

"Too late!" cried Sonnenkamp, seizing both her hands. "Bella, you say,
that, if I had come in your youth, you would have gone with me into the
wide world. Bella, Countess, we are young so long as we will to be. You
are young, and I will be young. When you came to me that time in the
spring, I gave you a rose, a centifolium, and said to you, you are not
like this flower. And you are not like it; for your bloom is ever
fresh; your will, your strength, blossoms. Be courageous; be yourself;
be your own. What are seventy maimed, idle years? One year full of life
is more than they all."

Bella sank back in her chair, and covered her face with her
handkerchief.

"Why did you appeal to the Court," she said at length, "if you meant to
leave before sentence was pronounced?"

"Why? I thank you for the question. I am free: henceforth I can speak
the honest truth, and to you above all others. For a while, I really
believed that this would offer me a way of escape. But I soon abandoned
that idea, and now"--

He paused.

"And now?" repeated Bella.

"I wanted to show these puppets, these children who are always giving
themselves up to leading-strings which they call religion or morality
or politics,--I wanted to show them what a free human being was, an
undisguised egoist. That tempted me. When the time came for putting my
plan into execution, it was only for your sake that I carried out what
I had proposed; for you only I laid bare my whole life. I was resolved
you should know who I am. I hardly spoke to the men who were before me;
I spoke to you; behind myself, above myself, I spoke to you, Bella."

"Were you then already decided not to wait for the sentence?"

Sonnenkamp nodded with a smile of triumph. There was a long pause. He
held her hand firmly. At last she asked hesitatingly,--

"Would not my flight confirm the injurious suspicion, the suspicion
that Clodwig was"--

"Fie!" interrupted Sonnenkamp; "as if it would not have been easier to
desert a living husband than to murder him first!"

Bella shuddered at the words, and Sonnenkamp exclaimed,--

"O Bella! noble soul, alone great among women, cast away all these
European casuistries; with a single step put this whole, old-maidish
Europe behind you!"

A still longer pause followed: there was no sound but the screaming of
the parrot.

"When do you start?" asked Bella.

"To-night,