Then he felt his knees trembling and terror took hold of him again, not at the thought of going back to her, but at the thought that she might have accepted her fate and be already beginning to forget him.
Then he realized that in the depths of his heart the hardest thing to bear since he came down from the mountain had been this—not knowing anything about her, her silence, her vanishing out of his life.
This was the veritable death, that she should cease to love him.
He buried his face in his hands and tried to bring her image before his mind's eye, then he began to reproach her for those things for which she might justly have reproached him.
"Agnes, you cannot forget your promises! How can you forget them? You held my wrists in your two strong hands and said to me: 'We are bound to each other for ever, in life and in death.' Is it possible that you can forget? You said, you know...."
His fingers gripped at his collar, for he was suffocating with his distress.
"The devil has caught me in his snare," he thought, and remembered the hare who had gnawed off her own foot.
He drew a deep breath, rose from his chair, and took up the lamp. He determined to conquer his will, to gnaw his own flesh also if thereby he could only free himself. Now he decided to go up to his room, but as he moved towards the hall he saw his mother sitting in her accustomed place in the silent kitchen, and beside her was Antiochus fast asleep. He went to the door:
"Why is that boy still here?" he asked.