He could not prevail upon him; a man's sorrow has no desire to be comforted.
Rudolf accompanied him to the wayside csárda, where the sledge was awaiting him. He could not restrain himself from warmly pressing the artisan's hand and even embracing him.
And Alexander did not guess the meaning of that warm grasp, or why this great nobleman was so good to him.
Shortly afterwards the sledge disappeared in the darkness of the night by the same road by which it had come. Rudolf returned to the pine-trees, and paid another visit to the white monument. There he stood and thought of the woman who had suffered so much, and who, perhaps, was thinking of him there below. Her face stood before him now as it had looked when she had followed with her eyes the rejected amaranth; as it had looked when she galloped past him on her wild charger; as it had looked when she had hidden it on his bosom in an agony of despairing love, in order that there she might weep out her woe, amidst sweet torture and painful joy, that secret woe which she had carried about with her for years. And when he thought on these things, his fine eyes filled with tears.
He noticed the imprints of the knees of the departed youth, where he had knelt on the pedestal of the monument in the snow, and he fell a-thinking.
Did not this woman, who had so suffered, lived and died, deserve as much? And he himself bent his knee before the monument.
And he read the name. Like a spectral invitation, those five letters, F-a-n-n-y, gleamed before him so seductively.
For a long time he remained immersed in his own reflections, and thought—and thought—
At last he bent down and kissed the five letters