l
the next day. Eric was certainly removed from all selfishness, but the
freedom of living for a whole day without being called upon to talk,
and of being entirely by himself, had a charm for him as if he had now,
for the first time, escaped out of the captivity of servitude, and
acquired the disposal of himself. The thought came over him at one
time, that Clodwig was expecting him but he said almost aloud,--

"I cannot!--I must not!" He wished to pass a single day without
speaking or being spoken to, to be by himself, alone, speechless,
solitary, referring to no one, and no one referring to him.

He thought, for one moment, of writing to his mother, but he dismissed
the idea. No one was to have anything of him, he would have all of
himself. This perpetual obligation to think for others, this striving
for them and love to them, seemed to him a painful and keen suffering;
there was now, in the depths of his soul, a call for solitude. For a
single day only would he be an egoist, live in absolute rest, and let
no book, no relation of life, no longing, no endeavor, deprive him of
aught of this entire loneliness.

This villa was called Eden, and he would, for one day, be the first man
alone in Eden. He looked at a tree and nodded to it. Fixed thus,
abiding in himself, like this tree, would he live for just a single
day.

He lay down in the park under a spreading beech-tree, and dreamed away
the day. There is a low, gladsome rippling of being and of feeling,
without definite thought or volition, which is the inmost desire of
those harassed with restless thought and anxious care. Eric lay thus,
happy in himself, contemplating and breathing alone, so that the step
of a gardener upon the grating gravel aroused him as from a dream. The
gardener began to rake the path; it was a strangely harsh sound. Eric
would have liked to bid him keep still, but he forbore, and said to
himself, smiling,--

"Thou art just such a raker of the paths."

He looked into the branches of the trees, and as the gentle breeze
moved them to and fro, so he allowed his thoughts to be swayed hither
and thither, with no desire, no conscious endeavor,--simply living. All
was peaceful and silent within him. How long, ever since its first
shooting forth, has such a leaf been moved by the wind the whole summer
long, until it drops, and then--well, then?

A smile passed over his countenance. We are no longer alone,
because there is a second self, and one i