a day declining toward the calm,
melancholy hours of dusk. It seemed to her like an open, wide-awake
space of time, with hot pulses throbbing every second, with joyous
light, with energy and swiftness and an infinity without and within. And
she was thrilled with the fullness of life, and longed for it with the
feverish eagerness with which a traveler sets out on a journey.

For a long time she stood thus, wrapped in her thoughts, forgetting
everything around her. Then suddenly as if she heard the silence in the
room and the long-drawn singing of the gas-flames, she let her hand
drop from the vase and sat down by the table and began to turn over the
leaves of a portfolio.

She heard steps, passing by the door, heard them turn back, and saw
Thorbrogger enter.

They exchanged a few words but as she seemed occupied with the pictures,
he also began to look at the magazines that lay in front of him. They,
however, did not interest him very much for when a little later she
looked up, she met his eyes which rested searchingly upon her.

He looked as if he were just about to speak, and there was a nervous,
decided expression round his mouth, which told her so definitely what
his words would be that she reddened.

Instinctively, as if she wished to hold back these words, she held out
a picture across the table and pointed at some horsemen from the pampas,
who were throwing lassoes over wild steers.

He was just about to make some jesting remark about the draftsman's
naive conception of the art of throwing a lasso. It was so enticingly
easy to speak of this rather than of that which he had on his mind.
Resolutely, however, he pushed the picture aside, leaned a little ways
across the table and said,

"I have thought a great deal about you since we met again; I have always
thought a great deal about you, both long ago in Denmark and over where
I was. And I have always loved you, and if it sometimes seems to me that
it is only now that I really love you since we have met again, it is not
true, however great my love may be, for I have always loved you, I have
always loved you. And if it should happen now that you would become
mine--you cannot imagine what that would mean to me, if you, who were
taken from me for so many years, were to come back."

He was silent for a moment, then he rose, and came closer to her.

"Oh, do say a word! I am standing here talking blindly. I speak to you
as to an interpreter, a stranger, who has