The eyes of this strange, compelling being flooded her like a spring season of sunshine. He stood high as the clouds above her. The sunshine overpowered the earth, but the earth yielded itself gladly to its rays. Was that the secret of her nature too? she herself asked. The season, now wild and stormy, advanced like a monster endued with power, from beyond the horizon, over the forests, rivers, cities, mountains, looking neither to right nor left and penetrating to the very heart of things. “If this man overcomes me in such a way, fills my whole being, is that indeed Paradise? Is it for me completion, redemption, deliverance? Is this my second nature which I have never yet dared to follow?” She desired to resist, but a subtle and enchanting feebleness stole over her, and she felt herself like a March field, dark and yielding. A jackdaw was screeching in it, but somewhere or other a thrush was singing behind her. And the screeching jackdaw and the singing thrush were snatching at a maggot, a living maggot in the bark of the tree, and even the bark of the tree seemed to be awaiting and expectant, and there was a murmuring sound in its cells. And the thrush mounted high into the air, singing triolets born of the spirit of the soil.... Woman was the thrush, and at the same time she was the maggot. She yielded herself to the destroying force, and knew it not for the tumult in her blood. She was stirred in her inmost being, plunged into the depths and soared again, intangible as an air-bubble.... Above her rose the call of the man like the rustling sound of the summer, calling the sap to rise, to push forward the growth which should end in a glorious harvest. XIV Mabuse’s visit to Count Told duly took place. “Your neurosis is not by any means an unusual one,” said the doctor. “It will be cured when you regain control of yourself, but it will become worse and finally be incurable if you don’t succeed in doing that. It is a precursor of _dementia præcox_. For professional reasons I shall treat you in your own home, as I do all my patients. I make one condition, however. As long as you are undergoing treatment you must not leave the house or see anyone who recalls your former life.” Told was stupefied by the power and authority which this doctor assumed towards him. Timid and shrinking by nature, downcast by what had occurred, he did not venture to make any objection, and from the very first moment he stood in absolute awe of him. When Mabuse left the villa, in which he had seen many things which revealed the life the Count and his wife had led, he said to himself, “He must be got rid of if she even mentions him again.”