"Eric, kiss me!"
Eric understood her meaning; she wanted to see if he could kiss her with pure lips. He kissed her. Mother and son uttered no word.
Every pain was removed from Eric's whirling brain. And truth requires it to be said, that the most painful thought was, that a feeling of regret had come over Eric, a short time previously. The tempter suggested that he had been too scrupulous, too conscientious. He had thrust from him a beautiful woman, who was ready to clasp him with loving arms. When he surprised himself in these thoughts, he was profoundly wretched. All pride, all self-congratulation, and all exalted feelings of purity, were extinguished; he was a sinner without the sin. He had believed himself raised upon a lofty eminence; he had even represented his love to Bella in stronger colors than the facts warranted. Now there was a recoil, and the whole power of the rejected and disdained love avenged itself upon his doubly sinful head.
For a long time he wandered about in the quiet night.
The soul has its feverish condition from wounds as well as the body, and equally requires a soothing treatment.
Eric had amputated a part of his soul in order to save the rest, and he suffered from the pain. But as the dew fell upon tree and grass, and upon the face of Eric, so fell a dew upon his spirit.
The self-exaltation of virtue was now taken out of him, washed away by his double repentance, and he was now again a child.
As he looked back to the vine-embowered house, he thought: I will, as a man, preserve within me the child; and still further he thought: Thou hast withdrawn thyself from temptation through the consciousness of duty; be tender towards the rich and great, to whom everything is offered, to whom so much is allowed; the consciousness of duty does not restrain them so absolutely as it does him who is in the world, him who must help and be helped by others, and who has lost everything when he has lost himself.
He returned home late in the evening; and at night he dreamed that he was struggling in the midst of the floods of the Rhine, and he, the strong swimmer, was not able to contend against the waves.
He shrieked, but a steam-tug drowned his cry, and the helmswoman of a boat looked down upon him with contempt—and all at once it was not the helmswoman, but a maiden form with wings and two brightly-gleaming eyes.