"My pink!" she said coaxingly. "You shall be Margherita's pink! Why are you going away? But I know! it's to become a judge----" Anania laughed and picked up the comfits. "And all the girls are to pick me up like a sugar plum, isn't that it?" He danced the kitten up and down, feeling quite affectionate to Nanna. Then suddenly became very gloomy. Who was the officer who wanted to marry Margherita? Was it that horrible Captain with the red neck who had said, "Hold your tongue, do!" Then he thought of something still worse. Margherita married to some young man, handsome--rich--eternally lost to the poor student. He set the cat down, and went away, shut himself up in his own room and looked out of the window. He was suffocating. It had never occurred to him that Margherita might marry. "No, no!" he said, squeezing and shaking his head between his hands. "She mustn't marry. She must wait. She must wait till--till I----. But why should she wait? How could I marry her? I am the son of a lost woman. I have no mission in life but to find my mother and draw her out of the abyss. Margherita could never stoop to me. But until I have fulfilled my mission, I need Margherita as I need a lighthouse. Afterwards--I can die content." He did not think that his "mission" might be prolonged indefinitely and without success. It did occur to him that he might aspire to Margherita if he were to renounce his mission; but this seemed monstrous, and he put the idea away. The thought of finding his mother had grown and developed with his growth. It palpitated with his heart, vibrated with his nerves, flowed with his blood. Only death could eradicate it; but it was of his mother's death that he thought when he wished that their meeting might not take place. The yearning for this solution, however, seemed to him great cowardice. Later he asked himself if it were natural sentimentality which had created this thought of his mission; or whether the thought had made him sentimental. At present he accepted his preoccupations and sentiments without analysis. Accepting them thus childishly he rooted them so firmly in his soul and in his flesh, that no logic, no conscious reasoning could have sufficed to pluck them up.