--all these
were simply temporary... I love you, very much"--she found my hand and
shook it with the same new, unfamiliar grasp--"but do you hear how
they are knocking there? They are knocking, and something seems to be
falling, some kind of walls seem to be falling--and it is so spacious,
so wide, so free. It is night now, and yet it seems to me that the sun
is shining. I am thirty years of age, and I am old already, and yet it
seems to me that I am only seventeen, and that I love some one with my
first love--a great, boundless love."

"What a night!" I said. "It is as if the city were no more. You are
right, I have also forgotten how old I am."

"They are knocking, and it sounds to me like music, like singing of
which I have always dreamed--all my life. And I did not know whom it was
that I loved with such a boundless love, which made me feel like crying
and laughing and singing. There is freedom--do not take my happiness
away, let me die with those who are working there, who are calling the
future so bravely, and who are rousing the dead past from its grave."

"There is no such thing as time."

"What do you say?"

"There is no such thing as time. Who are you? I did not know you. Are
you a human being?"

She burst into such ringing laughter as though she were really only
seventeen years old.

"I did not know you, either. Are you, too, a human being? How strange
and how beautiful it is--a human being!"

That which I am writing happened long ago, and those who are sleeping
now in the sleep of grey life and who die without awakening--those will
not believe me: in those days there was no such thing as time. The sun
was rising and setting, and the hand was moving around the dial--but
time did not exist. And many other great and wonderful things happened
in those days.... And those who are sleeping now the sleep of this grey
life and who die without awakening, will not believe me.

"I must go," said I.

"Wait, I will give you something to eat. You haven't eaten anything
to-day. See how sensible I am: I shall go to-morrow. I shall give the
children away and find you."

"Comrade," said I.

"Yes, comrade."

Through the open windows came the breath of the fields, and silence,
and from time to time, the cheerful strokes of the axe, and I sat by the
table and looked and listened, and everything was so mysteriously new
that I felt like laughing. I looked at the walls and they seemed to me
to be transparent. As if