I told her what I had just been thinking about, and drawing near me she clasped her hands, and, in tones of suppressed anguish, whispered: "Pray with me! Oh, pray with me!"
"What shall I pray for? That the boys may die, and go to heaven and become angels?"
She stared at me in alarm, then turned and walked on as before, but now without a word.
We followed a foot-path through the wood: it led to the fish-pond, as I remembered from the story about little Hans; but we had to go more than half the length of the park in order to reach the latter. Through a ravine flowed a brook, and here a dam had been made. It was large so that the fish-pond had a considerable circumference. We had to step up from the foot-path in order to reach the edge of the pond. Stina continued to walk in front of me, and when she had climbed the bank and could see the pond and the two parents standing on it, she kneeled down, praying and sobbing. Now I was sorry for her.
When I also stood upon the bank and saw the parents, I was deeply affected. At the same time I heard voices in the wood behind me. They came from the people with the lanterns. The flickering light of the four lanterns that, subdued by the falling snow, was shed over human beings, the snow itself, the lower trunks of the trees, and the shadows into which some individuals in the party and some of the trees and certain portions of the landscape occasionally fell, all became fixed forever in my memory with the words I at that moment heard from the pond: "There is no hole in the ice!"
It was Atlung's voice, quivering with emotion. I turned and saw his wife on his neck. Stina had sprung up with an exclamation which ended in a long but hushed: "God be praised and thanked!"
But the two on the ice still clung together, with some difficulty I climbed down from the bank and crossed to where they stood; the wife still hung on Atlung's neck and he was bowed over her. I paused reverently at a little distance; they were whispering together. The light shed by the lanterns on the pond was the first thing that roused them.
"But what next? Where shall we seek now?" asked Atlung.
I drew nearer. I now repeated to the parents, although more cautiously, what I had already said to Stina, that perhaps the children were sitting somewhere under a tree, waiting in their distress of mind for compassionate angels, and in that case there would be danger of their being already so cold that they would be ill. Before I had finished speaking, Atlung had called up to those on the bank: "Had the boys their out-door things on when they were last seen?"
"No," replied two of the by-standers.