with her. If she looked anywhere, she saw somebody’s eyes turning aside, though they had but just been fixed upon her. She heard within her the well-known old song:
“Only once we live down here:
Beauty, youth soon disappear;
Age runs riot with our face,
Of our youth leaves not a trace,”
That song kept on returning to her all the time, and she hummed it inwardly. On that day it sounded so melancholy, so despairing, as if she were to bury with it her young, empty life. For a moment the face with the dark glance would flash in her mind, the right eye looking sideways,—again she was gazing at it. That stung her. . . . Where was he now? How much more gladly would she have been sitting there in the park, by his side . . . his cough dinned distinctly in her ear, and she trembled.
“Only once we live down here.”
If she could only redeem his life by her lost,
