everything would be unsealed just as it had been sealed up: but when they gave her the child into her arms and told her that they had to seal up all the dwelling, and she all at once found herself with her infant outside her own home on the threshold, then she grew still as a stone statue and in her mind the waves began to rise so high that she was almost deafened by their roar.
Whither was she to turn? Karla sat on her doorstep and was unable to realize in her mind the true state of her fortune. He who finds himself in a desert and hits upon a little path follows it and though every hope should close before and behind him, yet trusts that this little path will somehow lead him to safety. And he concentrates his whole attention on it lest he should lose sight of what measures space in the infinity. But when a desert in all its infinity stretches out before a man, he loses at first even his very consciousness. He has no standard of measurement, his very being loses itself like a grain of sand in a sand-hill, he is a mariner without reckoning or compass.
Ought she to cry out? ought she to fly for succour? Aid no doubt would be easily obtained. He who has always had abundance of everything believes also in the superfluity of others. It was not possible that all these people should not care whether the seal should be torn off her doors as soon as may be; so that she might again enter her rooms and there put her little one to bed. It was not possible that people should dwell hard by in ease and comfort seeing how Karla had neither one nor the other.
Such thoughts forced themselves upon her, and she put faith in them because they were natural. She did not know or she did not choose to know that one can drown within a stone’s throw of the bank. Karla trusted in the security of those banks: surely some boat would put out from them to save her: always hitherto she had seen them. The trees blossomed above them, people walked along them and conversed, birds twittered, grass put on fresh tints of green, and children frolicked upon them. The inexperienced sailor cannot believe that his vessel may split upon a rock and that when he stretches forth his hands for succour, it will be flung off with a heart of stone. Wealth appeared to Karla to be a natural necessity: hitherto she had never met any one without it. How, then, could it be possible that she was forbidden to step across the threshold of her own home and dwell there according to her own pleasure?
Karla had not yet risen in order to test whether the latch pressed would permit her to enter her own dwelling. She felt quite
