I haven't
seen him for a whole year.'

Luckily at this moment, for I think we were going to quarrel, Gertrud
came heaving through the sand towards us with a packet of letters. She
had been to the post, and knowing I loved getting letters came out to
look for me so that I might have them at once; and as I eagerly opened
them and buried myself in them, Charlotte confined her occasional
interjections to deprecating the obviously inferior shape of Gertrud's
head.

THE FIFTH DAY

FROM THIESSOW TO SELLIN

Many a time have I wondered at the unworthy ways of Fate, at the
pettiness of the pleasure it takes in frustrating plans that are small
and innocent, at its entire want of dignity, at its singular
spitefulness, at the resemblance of its manners to those of an
evilly-disposed kitchen-maid; but never have I wondered more than I did
that night at Thiessow.

We had been for a walk after tea through the beechwood, up a hill behind
it to the signal station, along a footpath on the edge of the cliff with
blue gleams of sea on one side through a waving fringe of blue and
purple flowers, and the ryefields on the other. We had stood looking
down at the village of Thiessow far below us, a cluster of picturesque
roofs surrounded on three sides by sunlit water; had gazed across the
vast plain to the distant hill and village of Gross Zickow; watched the
shadows passing over meadows miles away; seen how the sea to the west
had the calm colours of a pearl; how the sea beneath us through the
parting stalks of scabious and harebells was quiet but very blue; and
how behind us, over the beech-tops, there was the eastern sea where the
wind was, as brilliant and busy and foam-flecked as before. It was all
very wide, and open, and roomy. It was a place to bless God in and cease
from vain words. And when the stars came out we went down into the
plain, and wandered out across the dewy grass in the gathering night,
our faces towards the red strip of sky where the sun had set.

Charlotte had not been silent all this time; she had been, on the
contrary, passionately explanatory. She had passionately explained the
intolerableness of her life with the famous Nieberlein; she had
passionately justified her action in cutting it short. And listening in
silence, I had soon located the real wound, the place she did not
mention where all the bruises were; for talk and explain as she might it
was clear that her chief grievance was that the great