“Does it know the glances of human beings? How still! Listen! How the nightingale sings! Ah, this is a song! so deep, so broad! Can that be one bird alone?” And now Amrie shivered; for as the clock struck one, a tile, loosened from the roof, fell clattering to the ground. She trembled as she thought of ghosts, but constrained herself to listen again to the nightingale, till at length she closed her window. A moth, that looked like a great flying caterpillar full of wings, had ventured into the chamber, and fluttered about the light, gray and frightful. Amrie seized him at last, and threw him out into the darkness.
She now lays her cap, handkerchief, and jacket in a drawer, where unconsciously she seized upon an old school copy-book, preserved there, and read therein, she knew not why, old moral maxims and sentences.
“How stiff and carefully are they written.” Yes, she might collect from these leaves that she once lived in the past, for all her past life seemed to have vanished.
“Now quickly to bed,” she cried; but, with her determined carefulness, she smoothed out all her ribbons, undid every knot with fingers or needle. Never in her life had she cut a knot, and now, in her extraordinary excitement, her usual care and patience did not forsake her. Every hard and embarrassing knot was patiently loosed. At last she calmly and carefully extinguished her lamp, and laid down in bed. But she found no rest, and springing up again quickly, and leaning upon the open window, she looked out into the dark night, where the stars only glimmered. In chaste modesty she covered her neck and bosom with both hands.
And now there was within her a moment of feeling, so wordless, so limitless, and yet so all embracing; a moment of death, and then of life in the whole universe, in Eternity!
Yes, in the soul of this poor girl, in her garret, had opened all there is in an endless life. All the height and the depth; all the bliss of which man is capable; and this supernatural moment asks not, “Who is it that I thus exalt?” for the eternal stars shine upon the humblest cottage.
A gust of wind that blew the window-shutters together waked Amrie. She knew not how she had got to bed, and now it was day.
