t, leaning her elbows on her knees, she covered her eyes
with her hands so that I could only see that her lips were trembling and
that she was crying.

When I came to what the doctor had said about my condition resembling
that of a leper, and that thus God Himself had placed an obstacle in the
way of our union, while I tried consolingly to represent to her that for
the whole of our life, with the exception of the last two years, we had
really loved one another in a different way, like brother and
sister--she suddenly raised her head in wild defiance, so that I could
look straight into her tear-stained face, threw her arms around my neck
and forced me down on my knees in front of her. She pressed my head
close up to her throbbing heart as if she would defend me against all
who wanted to injure me. Then with her hand she stroked the hair back
from my forehead--I felt her tears falling on my face--and she repeated
caressingly again and again as if in delirium, that no one in the world
should take me from her.

This was too much for my weary, suffering heart; I seized both her hands
in mine and cried over them, with my head in her lap. My weeping grew
more violent, until at last it rose to a desperate, convulsive sobbing,
which I could no longer control, and which thoroughly alarmed Susanna;
for she hushed me, called me by my name, and kissed me like a child, to
quiet me. I felt such a deep need of having my cry out, that it could
not now be stopped.

When at last I became quieter she once more clasped her hands about my
neck, as if to compel my attention, bent forward, and looked long into
my eyes with an expression both persuasively eloquent and strong-willed
in her beautiful, agitated face. I must believe, she at last assured me
with the quick movement of her head, with which she always emphasised
her words, that concerning ourselves she knew a thousand times better
than any doctor what God would have, and in this we ought to obey God
and not a doctor's human wisdom. And I was in many things so intensely
simple-minded, that I could be made to believe anything.

People like the doctor, she said, had no idea what love was. Had I been
strong and well, it would certainly have been God's will that she should
have shared the good with me, and so it must just as much be His will
that the same love should share my sorrow and sickness; but it was in
this that Dr. K.--he evidently became more and more an object of hatred
to he