sted with the painful uncertainty of the day, I fell asleep,
dressed, on my bed. Suddenly my wife aroused me. In her hand a candle
was flickering, which appeared to me in the middle of the night as
bright as the sun. And behind the candle her chin, too, was trembling,
and enormous, unfamiliar dark eyes stared motionlessly.

"Do you know," she said, "do you know they are building barricades on
our street?"

It was quiet. We looked straight into each other's eyes, and I felt my
face turning pale. Life vanished somewhere and then returned again with
a loud throbbing of the heart. It was quiet and the flame of the candle
was quivering, and it was small, dull, but sharp-pointed, like a crooked
sword.

"Are you afraid?" I asked.

The pale chin trembled, but her eyes remained motionless and looked
at me, without blinking, and only now I noticed what unfamiliar, what
terrible eyes they were. For ten years I had looked into them and had
known them better than my own eyes, and now there was something new in
them which I am unable define. I would have called it pride, but there
was something different in them, something new, entirely new. I took her
hand; it was cold. She grasped my hand firmly and there was something
new, something I had not known before, in her handclasp.

She had never before clasped my hand as she did this time.

"How long?" I asked.

"About an hour already. Your brother has gone away. He was apparently
afraid that you would not let him go, so he went away quietly. But I saw
it."

It was true then; the time had arrived. I rose, and, for some reason,
spent a long time washing myself, as was my wont in the morning before
going to work, and my wife held the light. Then we put out the light and
walked over to the window overlooking the street. It was spring; it was
May, and the air that came in from the open window was such as we
had never before felt in that old, large city. For several days the
factories and the roads had been idle; and the air, free from smoke,
was filled with the fragrance of the fields and the flowering gardens,
perhaps with that of the dew. I do not know what it is that smells so
wonderfully on spring nights when I go out far beyond the outskirts of
the city. Not a lantern, not a carriage, not a single sound of the city
over the unconcerned stony surface; if you had closed your eyes you
would really have thought that you were in a village. There a dog was
barking. I had never befor