For some time the state of affairs was clear to me. Absorbed in painfully sweet recollections she was wholly unconscious of the drift of her thoughts and continued to reproduce her reminiscences, the time in Gastein, the worry connected with the expectations of the letter, finally the information of her sister’s illness, the long wait until the evening when she could first leave Gastein, the journey with its tormenting uncertainties during a sleepless night—all these moments were accompanied by a violent aggravation of the pain. I asked her if during the journey she thought of the sad possibility which she afterward found realized. She answered that she carefully avoided the thought but that in her opinion her mother expected the worst from the very beginning. This was followed by the reminiscences of her arrival in Vienna—the impressions which she received from the relatives at the station, the short journey from Vienna to the neighboring summer resort where her sister lived, the arrival in the evening, the hasty walk through the garden to the door of the little garden pavilion—a silence in the house, the oppressive darkness, the fact of not having been received by the brother-in-law. She then recalled standing before the bed seeing the deceased, and in the moment of the awful certainty that the beloved sister had died without having taken leave of them and without having her last days eased through their nursing—in that very moment another thought flashed through Elisabeth’s brain which now peremptorily repeated itself. The thought which flashed like dazzling lightning through the darkness was, “Now he is free again, and I can become his wife.”