"You know … you know it all! I thought I had freed myself from him, but it was not so. My heart was given to him, and love had marked it with his picture, so that life had no other form for me. And then, when I loved again, and our first-born lay beneath my heart…. All that was in my thoughts that, time … and after, when the child was to be born … the struggle in my mind … how I did not always wish myself it should be otherwise—dearly as I have paid for it since…."
And at last, in a whisper, she spoke to her husband:
"It was terrible—terrible. For your sake, because you had been so good—you, the only one I love. It was as if I were faithless to you, and yet I know my heart was true. I would have borne the secret alone, that is why I have never spoken of it to you before. But now I must—and it hurts me that any should have known it before."
Olof was waiting—she could see it in his eyes.
"You know, I need not tell you how it has made me suffer," she said, turning towards him. "And when the second time came, and I was again to be a mother, I wept and prayed in secret—and my prayer was heard. It was a girl—and her father's very image. And after that I felt safe, and calm again…."
She marked how Olof sighed, how the icy look seemed to melt from his eyes.
And she herself felt an unspeakable tenderness, a longing to open her heart to him. Of all she had thought of in those years of loneliness—life and fate and love…. Had he too, perhaps, thought of such things? And what had he come to in the end? She herself felt now that when two human beings have once been brought together by fate, once opened their hearts fully to each other, it is hard indeed for either to break the tie—hardest of all for the woman. And first love is so strong—because one has dreamed of it and waited for it so long, till like a burning glass it draws together all the rays of one's being, and burns its traces ineffaceably upon the soul….
But his tongue was tied, as if they had been altogether strangers during those past years; as if they had nothing, after all, to say to each other but this one thing. And it was of this he was thinking now—with thoughts heavy as sighs.
"Life is so—and what is done cannot be undone—there is no escape…."
Those were Olof's words—all that he found to say to her in return.