“Why do you not speak to me?” she asked.
A confused smile passed over his face.
“Do not be angry,” he gasped.
“Why should I be angry?” she asked. “I am so glad to have you for once quite to myself. But it is strange—quite like a fairy tale. I am standing at the window, looking at the moon. Mamma has just gone to sleep, and I consider whether I, too, might venture to go to bed, but my thoughts are so restless and my forehead burns—I feel so uneasy. Then suddenly I hear somebody whistling in the garden, so beautifully, so plaintively, as I have only once heard it in my life, and that a long time ago. ‘That can only be Paul,’ I say to myself, and the more I listen the clearer it is to me. ‘But how does he come here?’ I ask myself, and as I want above all things to make certain, I put on my cloak and creep down—so—here I am now, and now come, let us go into the wood; there no one can see us.”
She laid her arm in his. Silently they walked across the moonlit meadow. And then suddenly she put both her hands up to her face and began to cry bitterly.
“Elsbeth, what is the matter?” he asked, terrified.
She trembled; her soft figure shook with noiseless sobs.
“Elsbeth, can’t I help you?” he pleaded.
She shook her head hastily. “It’s all right,” she gasped; “it will soon be over.” She tried to walk on, but her strength failed her. Sighing, she sank down into the damp grass.
He remained standing before her, looking down at her. “Let tears have their course;” that was the rule which he had already often experienced in life. All his timidity had left him. Here was somebody to be consoled, and he was a master at consoling.