ause of a
night of terror for us?'

'Who could have imagined her so depraved?' said Charlotte wrathfully.

'Well, we don't know that she is.'

'Doesn't it look like it?'

'Poor little thing.'

'Poor little thing! What drivel is this?'

'Oh I don't know--we all want forgiving very badly, it seems to
me--Hedwig not more than you and I. And we want it so much more badly
than we want punishing, yet we are always getting punished and hardly
ever getting forgiven.'

'I don't know what you mean,' said Charlotte.

'It isn't very clear,' I admitted.

THE SIXTH DAY

THE JAGDSCHLOSS

She was asleep next morning when I looked into her bedroom, so I shut
the door softly, and charging Gertrud not to disturb her, went out for a
walk. It was not quite eight and people had not got away from their
coffee yet, so I had it to myself, the walk along the shore beneath the
beeches, beside the flashing morning sea. The path runs along for a
little close to the water at the foot of the steep beech-grown hill that
shuts the west winds out of Binz--a hill steep enough and high enough to
make him pant grievously who goes up it after dinner; then on the right
comes a deep narrow cutting running up into the woods, cut, it seems,
entirely out of smoothest, greenest moss, so completely are its sides
covered with it. Standing midway up this cutting in the soft gloom of
its green walls, with the branches of the beeches meeting far away
above, and down at the bottom the sheet of shining water, I found
absolutely the most silent bit of the world I have ever been in. The
silence was wonderful. There seemed positively to be no sound at all. No
sound came down from the beech leaves, and yet they were stirring; no
sound came up from the water, not a ripple, not a splash; I heard no
birds while I stood there, nor any hum of insects. It might have been
the entrance to some holy place, so strange and solemn was the quiet;
and looking from out of its shadows to the brightness shining at the
upper end where the sun was flooding the bracken with happy morning
radiance, I felt suddenly that my walk had ceased to be a common thing,
and that I was going up into the temple of God to pray.

I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the
soul by the trying to do one's duty or the patient enduring of having
somebody else's duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the
bright beginning of the day, when the earth is stil