“There are facts”--he said slowly, hesitatingly, as if the words had to be forced out of his interior--“which one can hardly explain. I once loved a woman with such an intense love as I have not felt for any woman since. We spent a wonderful day together. Then we bade each other good-night. I remained standing, looking after her. She was walking through the high reeds in a meadow. Her graceful figure was getting smaller and smaller. With a slight turn in the road she disappeared from my view but soon reappeared. Then for a while I saw her shadowy outline until a clump of trees again hid her from my view. Then I saw her again, but very small. I saw something white--her handkerchief. At this moment a shiver went through me, and I thought: that’s how you will lose her; gradually you will cease to see her; twice she will re-appear, and then she will be gone for ever!--Nonsense, said I to myself, and spun bold plans for the future.... But the future proved that my presentiment had been true. Everything happened as I had felt it that evening. A glimpse into the future! And yet! Sometimes I think to myself that I had only realised the impossibility of a union between us. What I felt as a presentiment may have been only clearer inner comprehension.” The waiter yawned loud. This time we took the hint and paid. We went home, and something oppressive, unspoken, weighed us all down. As if we were not quite satisfied with the solution of the mystery--as if the shuddering sweetness of a superstitious belief in supernatural powers, a belief in a something above and beyond us would be more to our liking. Silently we took our way through the quiet streets. We felt, for all the world, like children who had been told by their mother that the beautiful story was only a story--that the prince and the princess had never really lived. We had been robbed of one of life’s fairy tales. Fie! Fie on this naked, sober, empty reality! How much nicer it would be if we could look into the future! LOOKING BACKWARD