“Show me your God.”
He bent over and looked her in the face:
“I don’t believe in your God,” he said.
She did not take her eyes from his and stretched out her trembling hands to him and her red mouth quivered with weeping:
“Then I don’t believe in Him either, Cordt.”
He turned away from her. Quietly she bowed her head, her tears fell upon her hands, she listened and moaned under the blows which she had received and longed for more.
But Cordt sat at the window and looked out where the rain came pouring down and the flame of the lamps flickered in the wind. His anger was over. He could not remember what they had been talking of. His thoughts were where they always were and all the rest was nothing.
Then he suddenly stood by her again and struck his hand on his temples and looked at her with fear in his eyes:
“Adelheid ... do you think Finn won’t come to us at all to-night?”
She understood that it was too late ... irremediably, hopelessly too late. She would never be able to tell him what was burning in her soul. He would never know that she did not come, because she was weary and because she was afraid, but that she had honestly wiped out the bad years of her life and stood again as he would have had her the time ... the time he wanted to have her thus.