sky is illumined at once; the low clouds drift along; behind them . . . behind them lies the infinity of eternity, of everything that may happen!"
The room was quite dark; she herself alone remained a white blur in the window-frame; and the night, the air, the lights were there outside, wide and eternal. And, in the sweet languor of the late summer hour, of the sultry night, of her uncontrollable illusion and hopes, she felt as though she were uplifted by a flood of radiant ecstasy, by a winged joy that carried her with it towards the sea yonder, towards the bright rifts of the lightning-flashes, towards the distance of futurity, eternity and everything that might happen . . . And she let herself be borne along; and in that moment a certainty came over her, penetrated deep down in her, like a divinely-implanted conviction, that it would be as she had dreamed and hoped and wished, that so it would happen, at long last, because life's chiefest grace was at length descending upon her . . .
Yes, it would happen like that: she knew it, she saw it in the future. She saw herself living by his side, in his heart, in his arms; living for herself and him; living for each other in all things; she saw it shine out radiantly with each lightning-flash in the radiant shining of those future years. She saw them, those children of the past, with the dew upon them, smiling to each other as though they who, as
