The young countess is coming too, as she always does where there is to be dancing and merry-making.
But she is not happy as she comes. It is as if she has a presentiment that it is now her turn to be dragged-in in adventure’s wild chase.
On the way she sat and watched the sinking sun. It set in a cloudless sky and left no gold edges on the light clouds. A pale, gray, twilight, swept by cold squalls, settled down over the country.
The young countess saw how day and night struggled, and how fear seized all living things at the mighty contest. The horses quickened their pace with the last load to come under shelter. The woodcutters hurried home from the woods, the maids from the farmyard. Wild creatures howled at the edge of the wood. The day, beloved of man, was conquered.
The light grew dim, the colors faded. She only saw chillness and ugliness. What she had hoped, what she had loved, what she had done, seemed to her to be also wrapped in the twilight’s gray light. It was the hour of weariness, of depression, of impotence for her as for all nature.
She thought that her own heart, which now in its playful gladness clothed existence with purple and gold, she thought that this heart perhaps sometime would lose its power to light up her world.
“Oh, impotence, my own heart’s impotence!” she said to herself. “Goddess of the stifling, gray twilight. You will one day be mistress of my soul. Then I shall see life ugly and gray, as it perhaps is, then my hair will grow white, my back be bent, my brain be paralyzed.”
At the same moment the sledge turned in at the bailiff’s gate, and as the young countess looked up, her eyes fell on a grated window in the wing, and on a fierce, staring face behind.
That face belonged to the major’s wife at Ekeby, and the young woman knew that her pleasure for the evening was now spoiled.