"I saw her again. How pretty she was, with her bright, lively ways, her animated charm, her rippling laugh, the endless number of questions she was always asking. I saw her again in the sunlight on the bright lawn. She was wearing a dress of old rose satin, and she bent over and smoothed the soft folds of her skirt and looked at her little feet. (Near us was the whiteness of a statue.) I remembered how once I had for fun tried to find a single flaw in her complexion. Not a spot on forehead, cheek, chin--anywhere. Her skin was as smooth as if it had been polished. I felt as though that exquisite delicate face were something ever in flight that had paused for an instant for my sake, and I stammered, almost with tears in my voice, 'It is too much! It is too much!' Everybody looked on her as a princess. In the streets of the town the shopkeepers were glad to see her pass by. Did she not have a queenly air as she sat half-reclining on the great carved stone bench in the park, that great stone bench which was now a kind of empty tomb? "For a moment in the midst of time I knew how much I had loved her, she who had been alive and who was dead, who had been the sun and who was now a kind of obscure spring under the earth. "And I also mourned the human heart. That night I understood the extremes of what I had felt. Then the inevitable forgetfulness came, the time came when it did not sadden me to remember that I had mourned. . . . . . "That is the confession I wanted to make to you, Anna. I wanted this story of love, which is a quarter of a century old, never to end. It was so real and thrilling, it was such a big thing, that I told it to you in all simplicity, to you who will survive. After that I came to love you and I do love you. I offer to you as to a sovereign the image of the little creature who will always be seventeen." He sighed. What he said proved to me once more the inadequacy of religion to comfort the human heart. "Now I adore you and you alone--I who adored her, I whom she adored. How can there possibly be a paradise where one would find happiness again?" His voice rose, his inert arms trembled. He came out of his profound immobility for a moment. "Ah, /you/ are the one, /you/ are the one--/you/ alone." And a great cry of impotence broke from him. "Anna, Anna, if you and I had been really married, if we had lived together as man and wife, if we had had children, if you had been beside me as you are this evening, but really beside me!" He fell back. He had cried out so loud that even if there had been no breach in the wall, I should have heard him in my room. He voiced his whole dream, he threw it out passionately. This sincerity, which was indifferent to everything, had a definite significance which bruised my heart. "Forgive me. Forgive me. It is almost blasphemy. I could not help it."