all grow to be like unto her!

I did not now expect her again on this day, and the garden was desolate
to me; but I could not leave it. For hours long I lay here, sat there,
went hither and thither along the untraveled paths; and only when
visitors became more numerous, so that I could no longer avoid them,
late in the afternoon, I turned toward home.

Returning from their vacation, the scholars soon began to reoccupy the
boarding school; I had to answer inquiries, make arrangements, and take
counsel with the housekeeper and the director. My heart and mind were,
however, so full of other matters and so far away from these, that I
performed all my duties with the greatest good-nature and
serviceableness, very much as, while at work, you stroke and scratch
your dog with your free hand.

In this manner I passed the evening hours.

The night, however, I passed with little sleep, and much meditation and
wakeful dreaming. Then it became evident to me that I was just
beginning an apprenticeship to love. And the first lesson showed me
that a weak, deluded, selfish heart must suffer pain and torture
through love. For love is not yielding, pitiful, indulgent,
self-surrendering; it is proud, compelling, inexorable as beauty, as
God Himself, who certainly does not love those to whom He is gracious
and merciful, and who has never yet taken pity on His elect. In such
thoughts I bathed, as in the icy morning dew of the mountains, for the
coming day.

When my duties of the forenoon were over, I hastened through the
already scorching heat to the park, into the bamboo alley, under the
erythrina, where I sat down.

For a long while I waited, and saw and felt nothing indicative of her
presence, and was nevertheless sure she would come. The bamboo scarcely
trembled in the blue heat of the sky. The dark trees and shrubs kept
still, as though not to frighten away the swarm of silver lights that
had descended upon them for rest. Unchangeable, flowing only back upon
itself, stood the pillar of spray of the distant fountain dazzlingly in
the air; its splashing resounded indistinctly. Only rarely, as though
waved by an indolent fan, a hot current of air rolled over to me and
eddied about me, sweet and comforting.

I looked over toward the fountain, and there she sat on the marble
curbing of the pool.

Briskly I arose and went toward her with measured steps. She had
disappeared. I seated myself upon a shady bench over against the place