The fog had become so impenetrable that the crescent of the moon hung a pale line of light in the grey sky and total darkness brooded over the intricate paths of the Thiergarten. It was no night for a solitary pedestrian, but she met no one, and she felt no fear. What indeed could happen to her? To be sure she might be attacked, robbed, or even killed by some drunken vagabond. But she was quite willing to run the risk of this, and the thought of other dangers to which a woman might be exposed in such a nocturnal ramble did not alarm her. When Adèle had once asked how she dared to go out so boldly at all hours of the evening, she replied: "I always go about with my face unveiled, I need no better protection." To-night in particular, with all the tortures of a hopeless love in her heart, she had become more firmly convinced than ever that she was a discarded step-child of Mother Nature condemned to perpetuate self-sacrifice; she felt a sort of bitter pleasure in the thought that she had nothing in common with the rest of mankind, either in love or hatred, but was as it were a peculiar being, allied to unknown creatures of darkness, who were as ugly as she, and therefore wise enough to avoid the daylight. In this wild mood which gradually obtained more and more the mastery over her, she would scarcely have been alarmed, if at some crossing in the paths she had chanced upon a crowd of spectres and been bidden to make one of their company. Anything would be better than to return to mankind, the best and noblest of whom had always made her the most miserable without even suspecting the fact. She shed no tears; all personal feelings--love for Edwin, jealousy of the beautiful girl--receded farther and farther into the background of her thoughts; only her own destiny, the world in which her fervid heart was languishing, the tortures of a lost youth, the dread of a lonely and loveless old age,--these rose in ghostly, exaggerated outlines before her soul, and from time to time extorted from her a cry, that in the deep silence startled even herself. When she came to the fish ponds, above which floated still denser fogs, she involuntarily paused. For a long time she stood and gazed at the dense whiteness which never shifted and which seemed to be waiting for some wearied, hunted human life to find rest in its depths. But her seething blood, inflamed by the unusual indulgence in wine, recoiled from the thought of such an end. Mechanically and without thinking of what she was doing, she picked up a stone from the roadside and threw it into the mist-veiled water. The sullen plash of its fall recalled her to herself. She drew a long breath, trembled, wrapped her cloak closer around her, and then walked away more slowly than before, but taking a direct lane toward the city, which she reached in half an hour.