He swung his great lantern, and now there was light, and now its light was darkened. But he had huge influence to determine minds that were not self-determined. The sermon was over.... Dr. Martin Luther went away with University men; the crowd broke, hung lingering, discoursing upon the discourse, most unevenly divided into yeas and nays.... Then home it went, in units, twos, and groups, through the falling snow.
Elsa was again with Clara, in her home in the next city. Thekla and Eberhard came between the bare fruit trees to their door, opened it, and entering heard the orphan girl singing at her work. They put away cap and mantle, hood and mantle; they came to the fire, and, raking up the embers, laid on fresh wood, and brought into the room the brightness of leaping flame. The air grew warm. For all the falling snow without, flowers might have bloomed in here and the greenwood waved. Eberhard’s drawing-table stood by the window. The two, moving there, gazed out upon the snow, then, turning, looked each upon the other. They laughed.
Eberhard bent over the board. “Picture after picture upon the Road to the City of God!”
“Ten thousand, thousand, pictures!”
Bending, they looked at the drawing together, read together the verses lying beside it. “Good is the poem!” said Eberhard.
“And good is the picture!”
“What was it Conrad Devilson said the other day?”
“‘They fit like two halves of an apple.’... To talk in terms of halves—how strange that must seem in a world where one says, ‘Lo, an apple!’”
They laughed again, but then they sighed, looking from the window upon Hauptberg and the falling snow.