Ilse smiled, but her heavy eyelids quivered:
“The scheme of things is so miserably patched together.... Except for the indestructible divinity within each one of us, it all would be so hopeless.... I had never been able to imagine Jack and Death together––” She looked up at the clock. “He was alive only an hour ago.... Isn’t it strange––”
“Oh, Ilse, Ilse! I wish this God who deals out such wickedness and misery had struck me down instead!”
Neither seemed to notice the agnostic paradox in this bitter cry wrung from a young girl’s grief.
Ilse closed her eyes as though to rest them, and sat so, her steady hand on Palla’s. And, so resting, said in her unfaltering voice:
“Jack, of course, lives.... But it seems a long time to wait to see him.”
“Jack lives,” whispered Palla.
“Of course.... Only––it seems so long a time to wait.... I wanted to show him––how kind love has been to us––how still more wonderful love could have been to us ... for I could have borne him many children.... And now I shall bear but one.”
After a silence, Palla lifted her eyes. In them the shadow of terror still lingered; there was not an atom of colour in her face.