nbeams streamed in too, and made a pattern on her green silk
coverlet; her thoughts were lost in its mazes, so that she could not
close her eyes. She felt as if she had never been at once so happy and
so wretched. At heart she did not doubt for a moment that everything
really was just as it stood in the baleful letter; that she would never
possess him whom she loved. His own puzzling behavior, the way in which
he had suddenly broken off and rushed out of the room, confirmed the
anonymous accusation only too well. But the thought that she loved him,
and that he returned her love, crowded out all others, and made her so
glad in the depths of her heart, that no hostile fate could crush the
rejoicing within her. So he is to "give her back her faith in her own
heart!" What a senseless phrase! When had she ever believed in anything
as she believed in the strength and truth and invincibility of this
feeling, in the feeling that it was worth while to have lived through a
long youth without love and happiness for the sake of this man, so that
now she might lavish upon him a hoarded wealth of passion?

She could not help smiling when it occurred to her how often she had
thought that she had done with the world, and could look back without
regret upon the years of youth she had lost. What had become of those
ten anxious years? Had she really lived in them or only dreamed of
them? Was she not as young and inexperienced, as thirsty for happiness
and as coy in its presence, as she had ever been in the first blooming
years of her girlhood? Yes, she felt the courage of her earliest youth,
when she still believed in miracles, bubbling up within her from an
inexhaustible spring. She made no attempt to close her eyes to what
could and would happen. But that this love, hopeless as it seemed,
would be a source of unspeakable happiness to her, that in the
sanctuary of her heart she would never cease to look upon this man as
belonging to her--all this she admitted to herself in words so plain
that, as she lay there wide awake in the moonlight, they sometimes
found utterance in a half-audible soliloquy.

Then she marveled at the suddenness with which it had all come about,
but she soon convinced herself again that this was just as it should
be. She tried hard to picture to herself the kind of wife he might
have. But she could not; it seemed to her impossible that he could ever
have loved any one but herself. She closed her eyes and tried to re