Now and then she groaned out a suffering sigh.
She could not get rid of the sight of the handcuffs, and in her delirium felt the cold iron still in her hands, until at last the bitter feeling came over her of how miserably she had behaved to him. She felt as though the thought of her must make Nikolai sick.
She lay staring at herself as in a vision—how she had gone about and never thought or cared about anything but her own pleasure, while Nikolai, her smith boy, with the strong arms and the true eyes, who now sat behind the prison bolts, had striven and toiled, and saved, and worked for both of them, so that they might be together.
And she could see too, now, all at once, as if scales had fallen from her eyes, that he had been terribly afraid for her.
If only he still cared for her! He had said: "Go home, Silla"—twice—so kindly and gently, that she began to cry when she thought of it.
Had she known or understood what it was to love anybody before just now? And perhaps it was too late!
The thought filled her with despair again, and wild pictures arose in her mind—Veyergang falling and lying stretched upon the snow, and then Nikolai's arms with the handcuffs on them stretching up out of the factory waterfall.
She lay awake until the morning and saw the same things—the handcuffs in the waterfall, and Veyergang turning away from the blow and falling; and then the whole thing over again—and again.
She sat there the whole day until dusk. Then her restlessness drove her down to the police-station.
There the gas was already lighted in the passages, and there were so many doors through which busy men in uniform were going in and out. At the entrances several people were standing waiting.