itsun feast, the little blue-bell that I laid there. And you
sent it to him. I saw it. I did not know why I was sorry for you. Then
he told me during the dance that you had laughed at me. You went away,
and he told me you made fun of me in your letters. That hurt me. You
don't know how it hurt, even though I did not know why. Father wanted
me to marry him. And when you came I was afraid of you, but I was
still sorry for you and I loved you though I did not know it. It was
he who first told me so. Then I avoided you--I didn't want to become a
bad woman--and I still don't want to. Then he compelled me to lie. And
he made threats of what he would do to you. He would see to it that
you fell and were killed. It was only a joke, he said, but if I told
you, then he would do it in earnest. Since then I have not slept a
night, I have sat up in my bed and been full of deadly fear. I saw you
in danger and could not tell you and could not help you. And he made
slits in the rope with the ax the night before you went to Brambach.
Valentine told me that our neighbor had seen him creeping into the
shed. I thought you were dead, and I wanted to die too. For I was the
cause of your death, when I would die a thousand times to save you.
And now you are alive and I cannot grasp it. Everything is just as it
was, the trees, the shed, the sky, and you are not dead. And I wanted
to die because you were dead. And now you are alive, and I don't know
whether it is true or whether I am dreaming. Is it true? Tell me, is
it true? I will believe anything you say. And if you tell me that I
must die, I will die. But he may be coming! Perhaps he has been
listening! Tell Valentine to go to the court and have him taken away,
so that he can do you no more harm."

Thus the feverish woman went on raving, laughing and weeping in his
arms. Forgetting everything, like a child playing on the edge of an
abyss of which it knows nothing, she unconsciously called into life a
danger more deadly than the one which had just been averted, more
threatening than the one from which she wanted to guard the man with
her body. She did not realize what her passionate movements, the
sweetness of her reckless abandon, her caresses, her warm, throbbing
embraces must arouse in the man who loved her; that she was doing
everything that could make the man whose uprightness and honor she
trusted so blindly, forget uprightness and honor in the tumult of his
blood. She had no idea what a