Three years passed. Hedwig's husband died. Her illness had grown worse, and at the physician's advice she went south, to Nice. She lived in great retirement, broken into only now and then, when a young genius long of hair and none too clean of shirt turned up in her modest drawing-room, generally in money difficulties and bringing a letter of recommendation from her friend. Her one diversion was corresponding with K----, whose work and position kept him in Berlin. He often wrote her that he adored her like a saint. She, for her part, parried his onslaughts of ecstasy and was satisfied that in spite of his volatile nature and his growing fame, he preserved his old liking for her. Three years more passed. Then, once, late in autumn he suddenly appeared at Nice, tired, worn out by work, spiritually desolate, unsteadier than ever, but--a full-grown man. "I have come to be cured by you," he exclaimed the first time he was in her house. She wept for joy. Soon they dropped into greater intimacy than ever, and yet she sometimes experienced a sense of shyness which she had not felt before in her relation with him, for the very reason that he was no longer the boy she could look down on with unconstrained motherliness. The difference in years seemed to have been wiped out, inwardly as well as outwardly, and he had grown close to her intellectually, alarmingly close. He often complained to her of his afflictions--the miserable headaches that kept bothering him, the result of overwork, and then the worries of his profession, the disillusionments. They were by no means formidable, but easily too much for the spoiled darling of fortune. She devoured everything he said. The least little thing of concern to him assumed prodigious importance. But there seemed to be a good deal that he did not tell her. "And how about the women?" she asked, smiling, though tortured by suddenly rising jealousy. "Oh, let's not talk of the women. I've forgotten every one of them. Now you are my one and only one." She thrilled, but said nothing. Oh, had he known how _her_ whole being lost itself in his! These words of his caressed her from now on, echoing even in her sleep at night. They celebrated Christmas together. When the candles were burning on the tree and the homelike scent of pine and apples filled the room, he caught her hands, looked long into her eyes smiling, and said: "You know, you and I ought really to marry." She felt her blood bounding hot through her veins, but she held on to herself, and burst out laughing. "You think I'm joking," he went on. "No, no, I'm not. I am in deep earnest. You yourself tell me--we're each of us alone, we don't care about the world, we have come to understand each other as no other two people on earth have ever understood each other. Why should we not share our fate the rest of our lives?"