’She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down at her:  “He has left me,” she said quietly; “you always leave us—­for your own ends.”  Her face was set.  All the heat of life seemed withdrawn within some inaccessible spot in her breast.  “It would have been easy to die with him,” she went on, and made a slight weary gesture as if giving up the incomprehensible.  “He would not!  It was like a blindness—­and yet it was I who was speaking to him; it was I who stood before his eyes; it was at me that he looked all the time!  Ah! you are hard, treacherous, without truth, without compassion.  What makes you so wicked?  Or is it that you are all mad?”

’I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped it, it hung down to the floor.  That indifference, more awful than tears, cries, and reproaches, seemed to defy time and consolation.  You felt that nothing you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain.

’Stein had said, “You shall hear.”  I did hear.  I heard it all, listening with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness.  She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her resentment filled me with pity for her—­for him too.  I stood rooted to the spot after she had finished.  Leaning on her arm, she stared with hard eyes, and the wind passed in gusts, the crystals kept on clicking in the greenish gloom.  She went on whispering to herself:  “And yet he was looking at me!  He could see my face, hear my voice, hear my grief!  When I used to sit at his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his hand on my head, the curse of cruelty and madness was already within him, waiting for the day.  The day came! . . . and before the sun had set he could not see me any more—­he was made blind and deaf and without pity, as you all are.  He shall have no tears from me.  Never, never.  Not one tear.  I will not!  He went away from me as if I had been worse than death.  He fled as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen in his sleep. . . .”

’Her steady eyes seemed to strain after the shape of a man torn out of her arms by the strength of a dream.  She made no sign to my silent bow.  I was glad to escape.

’I saw her once again, the same afternoon.  On leaving her I had gone in search of Stein, whom I could not find indoors; and I wandered out, pursued by distressful thoughts, into the gardens, those famous gardens of Stein, in which you can find every plant and tree of tropical lowlands.  I followed the course of the canalised stream, and sat for a long time on a shaded bench near the ornamental pond, where some waterfowl with clipped wings were diving and splashing noisily.  The branches of casuarina trees behind me swayed lightly, incessantly, reminding me of the soughing of fir trees at home.

’This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.  She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,—­and there was no answer one could make her—­there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression.  And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion?  And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?