“But they’ll be sure to ask me the same questions they asked you.  You are a Roumanian—­”

“No, no!” exclaimed Rojanow, passionately.  “Have you never seen, never felt that—­I am a German?”

The effect of this declaration was not so great as Hartmut had feared.

The prince looked steadily at him for a minute, then he said: 

“I have thought that for some time.  The man who wrote ‘Arivana’ never learned the German language as part of his education; it was born in him.  But you bear the name of Rojanow—­”

“That was my mother’s name, she belonged to a Roumanian Bojarin family.  My own name is—­Hartmut von Falkenried.”

“Falkenried?  That was the name of the Prussian officer who came from Berlin with the secret despatches to the duke.  Is he a kinsman of yours?”

“He is my father.”

The prince glanced sympathetically at his friend, for he saw how it wrung his very soul to make this confession.  He felt that here lay hidden a family drama, and desirous to avoid all show of curiosity concerning it, he only said: 

“Take your own name as the son of your father; then every regiment in Prussia will be open to you.”

“No, that would close them forever—­I ran away from the cadet academy over ten years ago.”

“Hartmut!” There was atone of horror in the exclamation.

“Ah, you are like my father.  You regard me as a criminal.  You who were reared in freedom know naught of the severities and restraints of that institution, of its tyrannies, to which every one within its walls has to bow in blind obedience.  I endured it as long as I could, then I left it, for my soul demanded freedom and light.  I appealed to my father in vain; he but tightened the chains—­so I tore them apart and went away with my mother.”

His manner was wild and excited as he told his short, fateful story; but his eyes, anxious and watchful, never left his listener’s face.  His father, with his fierce, severe code of honor, had cursed him, but his friend, who adored him, who had professed such a deep admiration for his genius, surely he would understand him, and how he had been driven to take such a step.  But this friend was silent now, and in his silence lay his sentence.

“And you, too, Egon?” In the tone of the questioner, who had waited a long minute, and waited in vain for some word, there was inexpressible bitterness.  “You, who have so often said to me that nothing should hamper the poet’s flight, that he must break all bonds which would bind him to the earth.  That’s what I did, and it’s what you would have done in my place.”

The young prince drew himself up proudly, and answered decisively: 

“No, Hartmut, you are in error there!  I would perhaps have escaped from a severe school,—­but from military service never!”

There were again the same old hard words he remembered as a boy—­“the military service”—­“the service of arms!” All the blood in his body rushed to his head.