“Why should I be angry?” she asked. “I am so glad to have you for once quite to myself. But it is strange--quite like a fairy tale. I am standing at the window, looking at the moon. Mamma has just gone to sleep, and I consider whether I, too, might venture to go to bed, but my thoughts are so restless and my forehead burns--I feel so uneasy. Then suddenly I hear somebody whistling in the garden, so beautifully, so plaintively, as I have only once heard it in my life, and that a long time ago. ‘That can only be Paul,’ I say to myself, and the more I listen the clearer it is to me. ‘But how does he come here?’ I ask myself, and as I want above all things to make certain, I put on my cloak and creep down--so--here I am now, and now come, let us go into the wood; there no one can see us.” She laid her arm in his. Silently they walked across the moonlit meadow. And then suddenly she put both her hands up to her face and began to cry bitterly. “Elsbeth, what is the matter?” he asked, terrified. She trembled; her soft figure shook with noiseless sobs. “Elsbeth, can’t I help you?” he pleaded. She shook her head hastily. “It’s all right,” she gasped; “it will soon be over.” She tried to walk on, but her strength failed her. Sighing, she sank down into the damp grass. He remained standing before her, looking down at her. “Let tears have their course;” that was the rule which he had already often experienced in life. All his timidity had left him. Here was somebody to be consoled, and he was a master at consoling. When she had grown a little quieter he sat near her, and said, gently, “Will you unburden your heart to me, Elsbeth?” “Yes, I will,” she cried; “I have waited to do so these three long years. So long have I borne it, Paul, and I was almost choked with the burden, and have found no pitying soul in whom I could confide. Yonder in Italy and at beautiful Capri, where everything laughs and rejoices, I have often crept down to the sea in the middle of the night and cried out in my agony, and in the morning I have come back and laughed, even more than the others, for my mother--oh, mother, mother!” she cried, sobbing afresh. “Be calm; you have me now, to whom you can tell it,” he whispered to her. “Yes, I have you, I have you,” she gasped, and leaned her face on his shoulder. “You see I have always known that; but what good did that do me? You were far away, I was often nearly writing to you, but I feared you might have become a stranger to me and would misunderstand me. And since we are back I have only one thought: ‘I must confide in him, he is the only one who has known grief, he will understand me.’” “Tell me what it is, Elsbeth,” he urged. “She will die,” she cried out aloud. “Your mother?” “Yes.” “Who told you so?”