The young man shook his head slowly, and yet some dreamy and obscure memory did come to his recollection, of having heard this voice before, and of this face which had looked into his at some far distant period.  Half shy, half fascinated, he stood looking at this stranger, who suddenly threw her arms around him.

“My son, my only child!  Do you not know your own mother?”

“My mother is dead,” he answered, half aloud.

The stranger laughed bitterly, shrilly, and her laugh seemed but an echo of the hard, joyless sounds which had come from Hartmut’s lips a few moments since.

“So that’s how it is.  They would even say I was dead and not leave you the memory of a mother.  It is not true, Hartmut.  I live, I stand before you; look at me, look at my features, are they not your very own?  That at least they could not take from you.  Child of my heart, do you not feel that you belong to me?”

Still Hartmut stood motionless, looking into that face in which his own was so faithfully mirrored.  He saw the same lines, the same luxuriant, blue-black hair, the same dark, flashing eyes; and the same demoniacal expression which was a flame in the eye of the mother, was a spark in the eye of the son.  Their close resemblance to one another was witness enough that they were of one blood.  The young man felt the influence of the mysterious tie.

He demanded no explanation, no proof; the dreamy, confused recollections of his childhood were suddenly clear, and after a second’s hesitation he threw himself into the arms which were stretched out to him.

“Mother!”

In this cry lay the whole fervid intensity of the boy, who had never known what it was to have a mother, and who had longed for one with all the passion of his nature.  His mother!  And now he lay in her arms, now she covered him with warm kisses, and called him by sweet, tender names, which had been strangers to his ear until that moment—­everything else seemed forgotten by him in this flood of stormy ecstasy.

After a few minutes Hartmut loosed himself from the arms which still enfolded him.

“Why have you never been with me, mamma?” he asked vehemently.  “Why have I always been told that you were dead?”

Zalika stepped back, and in an instant all tenderness had died out of her eyes, and in its place was a wild, deadly hate, as the answer came like a hiss from between her set lips.

“Because your father hates me, my son—­and because he wishes to deny me the love of my only child since he thrust me from him.”

Hartmut was silent.  He knew well enough that the name of his mother dare not be mentioned in his father’s presence, and that he had been sharply reproved once for doing so, but he had been too much a child at the time to ask “why.”  Zalika gave him no time to do so now.  She brushed the thick locks back from his brow and a shadow crossed her face.

“You get your forehead from him,” she said slowly.  “But that is the only thing that reminds me of him, all the rest belongs to me and me alone.  Every feature tells that you are mine—­I always knew that.”