Strange! While he was speaking to her with hurried yet clear words--drawing her aside even in the last moment while Ottomar and Bertalde were arranging a few things in the next room--it all passed over her like an empty sound--she scarcely knew what he was talking about. And now it all came back to her mind--word for word--it had all been fulfilled--word for word! All-powerful Love! Great Heavens! It was a mockery! What else had he for the visions of the future, which she had painted to him in glowing terms fresh from her overflowing breast, than a melancholy, dismal smile, dispirited monosyllabic replies, which he only made in order to say something while his heart was weighed down by the thought of his angry father, his sympathetic or scoffing comrades, or the question whether he would be able after all to force von Wallbach to fight a duel. His caresses even, when she held him in her arms with her heart full of untold anxiety, as a mother who rescued her child from the flames--she shuddered when she thought of them: as if she were a girl in love whom one must humor--a mistress whom one takes along on a journey and whom one must not allow to feel that she is a burden at the first station. She, she--who once had dreamed that her love was an inexhaustible fount, and had reproached herself for having been so niggardly with it, for having turned her lover from her door, for having left him out in the dreary waste of life, where he must perish in anguish and despair! She, who was so haughty because she knew that she had all the world to give; that her love was like the storm which surges on, overriding everything that is not stronger than itself--like a flood which rolls on, destroying everything that does not rise into the clouds. That had been her fear all along; he too--even he would not understand her entirely; there would be a yawning breach between her ideal and the reality, and she must not on that account sacrifice her ideal, even though her heart throbbed with even greater longing and the blood coursed through her veins even more imperiously. She had only this one greatest thing to lose in order to be poorer when it was lost than the poorest beggar--she whose implacable mind destroyed once and forever the fair dream of many years of being a true artist! How she had fought! How she had struggled through so many dreary days, so many wakeful nights, in gloomy brooding and racking despair to the horror of which, strong though she was, she would long ago have succumbed, had not his dear illusive image flitted through her morning dreams, luring her on to other dreary days, to other nights of torture. Now it was no longer his image; it was he himself--illusive no longer, and yet still dear! Oh, how deeply she had loved--more than ever, infinitely more in his helpless misery, than in the days of his prosperity!