The old house was in flower. Never before had so many roses blossomed in the garden. Anne wanted it so. She carried the flowers into the house and went, faintly smiling, from room to room. She looked at every object curiously as if she were seeing it for the first time. The furniture, the pictures, they all seemed different now; she looked at them with different eyes, with the eyes of one for whom she waited. Had not somebody said to her the other day, on the pier of the Danube, “Au revoir....”
Since then she had not met Thomas Illey. And yet she had never taken so many walks with Mamsell Tini. Sometimes she was quite tired and still she wanted to go on, towards the pier on the Danube, through the inner town. A clean-cut profile behind the window of a carriage rumbling by: her heart rose. But no, it was another mistake. A slender form near the corner; when it came nearer it was a stranger.
The days grew hot, the nights were close.
A window of the Ulwing’s house opened softly in the moist early morning. The shadows were still deep on the front. Opposite, sunlight was streaming golden over the castle hill, as if it shone through a window of amber.
Anne leaned out into the clear sunrise. She looked towards the island. When she turned back again the rays of the yellow morning sun had reached the bottom of the hill and came floating across the Danube.
Steps approached. Tramping boots, the slap-slap of naked feet. At the corner a three-storied building was under construction. The name of an unknown contractor hung from the scaffolding. Shouts, hammering.... On the other side of the street another new house. That was built by the Ulwings, but it made slow progress. Many houses.... Workmen poured into the town from the countryside. The streets were loud with patois talk. The old, fair, German citizens seemed to have disappeared.
A peasant girl in a bright-coloured petticoat passed under the window beside a mason. The ample petticoat rustled pleasantly in unison with the heavy footsteps of the man. Anne looked after them. “Lucky people, they are together!” She thought of herself and remembered a dream. She had dreamt it last night, though she had imagined that she had not slept at all.
In her dream she walked a strange street by herself. That was unusual and frightened her. Only one person was visible in the deserted street, at the far end of it. She recognised him by his elegant, careless gait. She followed him, faster and faster, but the distance between them remained the same.
The street began to stretch and become longer and longer.
And he looked quite small, far, far away. She could not reach him though by now she was running breathlessly. She wanted to shout to him to stop, stretching her arms out after him.