I must go.

I shall obey the impulse, without worrying myself with speculations as to its cause.  I am subject to the rules of no order.  My will is my only law.  I harm no one by obeying it.  I feel myself free; the world has no power over me.

I dreaded informing Walpurga of my intention.  When I did so, her tone, her words, her whole manner, and the fact that she for the first time called me “child,” made it seem as if her mother were still speaking to me.

“Child,” said she, “you’re right!  Go!  It’ll do you good.  I believe that you’ll come back and will stay with us; but if you don’t, and another life opens up to you—­your expiation has been a bitter one, far heavier than your sin.”

Uncle Peter was quite happy when he learned that we were to be gone from one Sunday to the Sunday following.  When I asked him whether he was curious as to where we were going, he replied:—­

“It’s all one to me.  I’d travel over the whole world with you, wherever you’d care to go; and if you were to drive me away, I’d follow you like a dog and find you again.”

I shall take my journal with me, and will note down every day.

* * * * *

[By the lake.]—­I find it difficult to write a word.

The threshold I am obliged to cross, in order to go out into the world, is my own gravestone.

I am equal to it.

How pleasant it was to descend toward the valley.  Uncle Peter sang; and melodies suggested themselves to me, but I did not sing.  Suddenly he interrupted himself and said:—­

“In the inns you’ll be my niece, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But you must call me ‘uncle’ when we’re there?”

“Of course, dear uncle.”

He kept nodding to himself for the rest of the way, and was quite happy.

We reached the inn at the landing.  He drank, and I drank too, from the same glass.

“Where are you going?” asked the hostess.

“To the capital,” said he, although I had not said a word to him about it.  Then he said to me in a whisper:—­

“If you intend to go elsewhere, the people needn’t know everything.”

I let him have his own way.

I looked for the place where I had wandered at that time.  There—­there was the rock—­and on it a cross, bearing in golden characters the inscription:—­

Here perished

Irma, countess Von Wildenort,

In the twenty-first year
of her life.

Traveler, pray for her and honor her memory.

I never rightly knew why I was always dissatisfied, and yearning for the next hour, the next day, the next year, hoping that it would bring me that which I could not find in the present.  It was not love, for love does not satisfy.  I desired to live in the passing moment, but could not.  It always seemed as if something were waiting for me without the door, and calling me.  What could it have been?