Bettina sank upon the ground, covering her face with the long drapery of her cape. Suddenly she felt a touch. Her heart leaped, and she uncovered her head, showing the light of a great hope in her eyes.
But it was only Comrade, nestling close to her, with human-eyed compassion. She threw her arms around him, and pressed her face against his shaggy side.
“Did he send you to me, Comrade,” she whispered, “because he knew that I was miserable and alone?”
The gentle creature whined and wagged his tail as if in desperate effort to reply.
“I know he did! I know he did!” she cried. “Oh, how kind and good and unrevengeful he is! And I can never tell him the truth. I can never tell that to any human being, Comrade, but I’ll tell it to you.” She drew his head close to her lips and whispered a few words in his ear.
Then she sprang to her feet, a great light in her eyes, as she threw her arms upward with an exultant movement, and cried, as if to some unseen witness up above, “I have said it!”
CHAPTER XIV
After this Bettina went about her preparations for departure with a spirit of calm and collectedness which came from the knowledge of herself, which she had at last fully accepted. Hundreds of times in these last few days her mother’s words had come back to her: “The day will come when you will know what you are incapable even of imagining now—what is the one perfect love and complete union that can ever be between two human beings.... Test the world, if you will—and your nature demands that you shall test it—but you will live to say one day: ‘My mother knew. My mother’s words have come true.’”