they laid the paper
down again. And she asked, with that strange calm with which this
betrothed pair were trying to get to know each other:

"Othomar ... do you care for nobody?"

A flush suffused his cheeks. Did she know of Alexa?

"I did once think that I ... that I was in love," he confessed; "but I
do not believe that it was really love. I now believe that I do not
possess the capacity to concentrate my whole soul upon a feeling for one
other soul alone; I should not know how to find it, that one soul, and I
should fear to make a mistake, or to deceive myself.... No, I do not
believe that I shall ever know that exclusive feeling. I rather feel
within me a great, wide, general love, an immense compassion, for our
people. It is strange of me perhaps...."

He said it almost shyly, as though it were something abnormal, that
general love, of which he ought to be ashamed before her.

"A great love," he explained once more, when she continued to look at
him in silence; and he made an embracing gesture with his arms, "for our
people...."

"Do you really feel that?" she asked, in surprise.

"Yes...."

A sort of vista opened out before her, as though an horizon of light
were dawning right at the end of her dark melancholy; but that horizon
was so far, so very far away....

"But, Othomar," she said, "that is very good. It is very beautiful to
feel like that!"

He shrugged his shoulders:

"Beautiful? How do you mean? I cannot but feel it when I see all the
misery that exists ... among our people, the lower orders, the very
lowest especially. If they were all happy and enjoying abundance, there
would be no need for me to feel it. So what is there beautiful about
it?"

She gave a little laugh:

"I can't argue against that, it's too deep for me. I can't say that I
have ever thought over those social questions; they have always existed
as they are and ... and I have not thought about them. But I can feel,
with my feminine instinct, that it is beautiful of you to feel like
that, Othomar."

She took his hand and pressed it; her face lit up with a smile. Then she
looked, pensively, into the dark landscape beneath them and she
shivered.

"It's turning chilly," he said. "We had better go in, Valerie; you'll
catch cold here."

She just felt at her bare neck:

"Presently," she said.

They glanced down, at the murmuring Danube. A mist began to rise from
the river and filled the valley as it were with light strips