He was led out soon after this to be shown to the monk, who had come to obtain news of his imprisonment. "In the doorway the young nobleman met Gro and drew back, so strong a power seemed to irradiate from her living form. She stood in the half twilight, with her white hands and her white neck and forehead, which shone as with their own light from out her coal black velvet robe. There was a blinding, marvelous reality about her, which drew him like a great fragrant flower." As the monk expressed his compassion for him, that imprisonment had befallen him, his pride of nobility awoke. "What do you say of imprisonment and ill foreboding? Know you not then that I am of my free will Sten Basse's guest?" This reply astonished even Sten Basse. "He admired the young, undaunted spirit, who found in himself no occasion for pity. Soelver stood before Gro, his arms firm at his sides, and breathed deep and strong. His eyes drank in the clear light from her hands and face." When however Sten Basse sought to approach him in a friendly manner, Soelver motioned him back: "As prisoner was I led forth, as prisoner I return of my free will. If you wish to make any apology to me, you know where my dungeon is to be found." Then he went quickly, without turning toward Gro, out of the hall and down into his prison. His senses nevertheless had seized that warm, radiant picture of the beautiful Gro and transplanted it to the midst of his cell. He saw it streaming before his eyes in the shimmering light of the cross of moonlight and longed for the clear light of the night, that he might go on and make the dream face live. When the darkness advanced "he stripped himself naked and allowed the air of the summer night to cool his limbs and purify them, before he betook himself to his cot. The small cross he laid upon his naked breast and watched the moonlight glimmer green and blue from every stone" and kissed it thinking of Gro. Then he fell asleep in blissful happiness. Suddenly however he awoke without any apparent reason, from no dream or thought. "He was awake, collected and yet at the same time strangely under the control of something that lay outside himself, a strange unknown power, which might be either mystical or natural. It appeared to him as if the moonlight had been loosed from the moon and now floated about in the room like a living being. So real seemed this fancy to him that he turned his head to one side and was not astonished actually to see a form standing in the center of the darkness. A feeling of reverence and awe swept over Soelver as little by little he distinguished in the floating folds of the moon white garment, the firm outlines of a woman's arms, which were crossed beneath a half bared breast, the line of the teeth in the open mouth, a flash of white light from Gro's eyes gazing with a certain fixed power. "Holy Mother of God--it was Gro herself!