"Bravo! You believe in our star! Since I met you I see it shining clearer over the heights. We mount, we mount, peak beyond peak. We have enemies enough now, thick as the serpents in tropic forests. Well, let them soil with their impure slaver the hem of our garments. But how they will crawl fangless when Ferdinand--the Elect of the People--makes his solemn entry into Berlin. And at his side, drawn by six white horses, his blonde darling, changed into the first woman of Germany." He, too, though to him the fancy was real enough for the moment, enjoyed it with a certain artistic aloofness. XII In honor of the _fiancés_--for such they openly avowed themselves, Geneva and Helene's family being sufficiently distant to be temporarily forgotten--the American Consul at Berne gave a charming dinner. There was a gallant old Frenchman, a honey-tongued Italian, a pervasive air of complimentary congratulation. Helene returned to her hotel, thrilling with pleasure and happy auguries. The night was soft and warm. Before undressing she leaned out of the window of her room on the ground floor, and gazed upon the eternal glaciers, sparkling like silver under the full moon. Through every sense she drank in the mystery and perfume of the night, till her spirit seemed at one with the stars and the mountains. Suddenly she felt two mighty arms clasped about her. Lassalle stood outside. Her heart throbbed violently. "Hush!" he said, "don't be frightened. I will stay outside here, good and quiet, till you are tired and say, 'Lie down, sir!' Then I will go!" "My gentle Romeo!" she whispered, and bent her fragrant lips to meet his--the divine kiss of god and goddess in the divine night. "My Ferdinand!" she breathed. "If we should be parted after all. I tremble to think of it. My father will never consent." "He shall consent. And you don't even need his consent. You are of age." "Then take me now, dear heart. I am yours--your creature, your thing. Fly away with me, my beautiful eagle, to Paris, to Egypt, where you will. Let us be happy Bohemians. We do not need the world. We have ourselves, and the moonlight, and the mountains." She was maddening to-night, his _enfant du diable_. But he kept a last desperate grip upon his common sense. What would his friends say if he involved Helene in the scandal of an elopement? What would Holthoff say, what Baron Korff? Surely this was not the conduct that would commend itself to the chivalry and nobility of Berlin! And besides, how could his political career survive a new scandal? He was already sufficiently hampered by his old connection with the Countess, and not even a public acquittal and twenty years had sufficed to lay that accusation of instigating the stealing of a casket of papers from her husband's mistress, which was perhaps the worst legacy of the great Hatzfeldt case. No, he must win his bride honorably: the sanctities and dignities of wedlock were seductive to the Bohemian in love.