"It is not as if you were lonely,--you have friends already.

We are nothing to you.

Soon you will go away, and you will think of the Altenfjord as a dream,--and our names will be forgotten.

That is natural!" What a foolish rush of passion filled his heart as she spoke in those mellow, almost plaintive accents,--what wild words leaped to his lips and what an effort it cost him to keep them hack.

The heat and impetuosity of Romeo,--whom up to the present he had been inclined to consider a particularly stupid youth,--was now quite comprehensible to his mind, and he, the cool, self-possessed Englishman, was ready at that moment to outrival Juliet's lover, in his utmost excesses of amorous folly.