"No, it is rather different. I feel so awake ... I can't tell you how awake I feel.... It seems as though I had never been so awake in my whole life. And I know at the same time that I'm going to sleep more deeply than I ever have ... as soon as I've once closed my eyes." "Yes, of course you will. But may I stay a bit longer with you? I'd really like to go on sitting here till you've fallen asleep." "No, George, if you are here I can't go to sleep. But just stay a bit longer. It's so nice." He held her hand all the time and looked out on to the garden, which was now lying in the twilight. "You weren't very much up at Auhof this year?" said Anna indifferently, as though simply making conversation. "Oh yes, nearly every day. Didn't I tell you?--I think Else will marry James Wyner and go with him to England." He knew that she was not thinking of Else but of some one quite different. And he asked himself: Does she perhaps mean ... that that is the reason? A warm puff blew in from outside. Children's voices rang in. George looked out. He saw the white seat gleaming under the pear-tree and thought of how Anna had waited for him there in her flowing dress, beneath the fruit-laden branches, girdled by the gentle miracle of her motherhood. And he asked himself: "Was it fated then that it must end like this? Or was it after all so fated at the moment when we embraced each other for the first time?" The Professor's remark that one to two per cent. of all births ended like that came into his mind. So it was a fact that since people had started being born one or two in every hundred must perish in this senseless fashion at the very moment when they were brought into the light! And so many must die in their first years, and so many in the flower of their youth, and so many as men. And again a fated number put an end to their own lives, like Labinski. And so many were doomed to fail in their attempt, as in Oskar Ehrenberg's case. Why search for reasons? Some law is at work, incomprehensible and inexorable, which we men cannot struggle against. Who is entitled to complain? why should I be the victim? If it doesn't happen to one, it will happen to another ... whether innocent or guilty like he was. One to two per cent. get hit, that is heavenly justice. The children who were laughing in the garden opposite, they were allowed to live. Allowed? No, they _must_ live, even as his own child had had to die, after the first breath it drew, doomed to travel from one darkness into another, through a senseless nothingness.