"I have no such right as you say," replied Oswald, "to be foolishly curious. I have to be grateful for the love which you grant me, and I am grateful for it, as for a sweet gift from on high. There was a time, I confess, when my love still knew what doubt was, but that was not yet true, genuine love. Now I cannot imagine that I could ever cease to love you, or that you could ever do so. I feel even as if this love was not only intended to be eternal, but had actually existed before, in all eternity. I do not know if you ever loved before; it may be, but I do not comprehend it, and would not comprehend it, even if you were to say so expressly." "And I assure you," said Melitta tenderly, coming closer to Oswald, "I have never loved till I saw you; for what I before called love was only unsatisfied longing after an ideal which I bore in my heart, which I could find nowhere, and which I had long despaired of ever finding." "And you fancy that I am this personified ideal? Poor Melitta! How soon you will awake from this dream! Awake, Melitta! awake--it is time yet!" "No, Oswald, it is too late. There is a love which is as strong as death, and there is no awaking from it. No! No awaking. I feel it. I know it. And if you were to turn your face from me, and if you were to push me from you--with you I know not what offended love, what insulted pride are--nothing but immeasurable, unfathomable, inexhaustible love. Till now I only knew that I could love; how much I could love, you first have taught me.... "And now also I can speak freely of the time when I did not yet know you--for then my life was only apparent life and all I felt and thought was only a vague dreaming without connection and sense. I know that now--now since I have opened my eyes in the sunlight of your love, and life lies clear and transparent before me, so that the deep night which surrounds us looks to me brighter than formerly the brightest day. Now I can speak of the Melitta of former days as of a strange person for whose doings and sayings I am no longer responsible; now I can and will tell you what that portrait in my album means--that detached leaf which frightened you so, darling.--Yes, I saw it all; you changed color, and you did not comprehend how I could ask your opinion of a man whom you could not but think my lover. And yet Oldenburg never was my lover, or there must be strange degrees in love, of which the lowest is as far from the highest as the earth is from heaven.