“Give me that!” she said, pointing to a red flask that lay on a crumpled handkerchief at her feet.
Niels went to take it. His face was crimson, as he bent over the milk-white, gently rounded legs and the long, slender feet, which had almost the intelligence of a hand in their fine flexible curves. He felt dizzy, and when one foot suddenly turned and bent downward with a quick movement, he almost fell.
“Where did you pick the flowers?” Edele asked.
Niels pulled himself together and turned toward her. “I picked them in the pastor’s rye-field,” he said, in a voice that sounded strange to himself. He handed her the flask without looking up.
Edele noticed his emotion and looked at him astonished. Suddenly she blushed, raised herself on one arm, and drew her feet under her petticoat. “Go, go, go, go!” she said, half peevishly, half shyly, and at every word she sprayed him with the attar of roses.
Niels went. When he was out of the room, she let her feet glide slowly down from the couch and looked at them curiously.
Running with unsteady steps, he hurried through the house to his own room. He felt quite stunned; there was a strange weakness in his knees and a choking sensation in his throat. He threw himself down on the couch and closed his eyes, but it was of no avail, a strange restlessness possessed him; his breath came heavily as in fear, and the light tortured him in spite of his closed eyelids.
Little by little a change came over him. A hot, heavy breath seemed to blow on him and make him helplessly weak. He felt as one in a dream who hears some one calling and tries to go, but cannot move a foot, and is tortured by his weakness, sickens with his longing to get away, is lashed to madness by this calling which does not know one is bound. And he sighed impatiently as if he were ill and looked around quite lost. Never had he felt so miserable, so lonely, so forsaken, and so forlorn.
He sat down in the flood of sunlight from the window, and wept.
From that day Niels felt a timid happiness in Edele’s presence. She was no more a human being like any one else, but an exalted creature, divine by virtue of her strange, mystic beauty. His heart throbbed with rapture in merely looking at her, kneeling to her in his heart, crawling to her feet in abject self-effacement. Yet there were moments when his adoration had to have vent in outward signs of subjection. At such times he would lie in wait for a chance to steal into Edele’s room and go through a fixed rite of a certain interminable number of kisses lavished on the little rug in front of her bed, her shoe, or any other object that presented itself to his idolatry.