For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which
he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend
a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and
conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric's
than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York City.
Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah! across
what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the
unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!
It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent
a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still
customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough
it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to
a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did
not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had
not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor
wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He
had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales
together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his
first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six years before, he
brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain
received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during
those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something
of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was
to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she
begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all
women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and
terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind--just once.
It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain
of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had
slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the
personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined
in a camp of railroad constructors at the world's end beyond New Castle,
gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome
Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide
in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all,
before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming
sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.
Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in this
day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful, talented,
critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four. For the moment
the life and people of the Divide interested her. She was there but a
week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels
faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The
week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping
Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.
It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and his
sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out
into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind
that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward.
The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
“This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
Kansas. It's the keynote of this country.”
Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:
“I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it takes
the taste out of things.”
She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
own.
“Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children and
were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know,
I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its
own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of
last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one's
strength out to such petty things any more.”
Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the skyline.
“No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't shake
the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time when the
gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the
sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too complex now. You see
we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've
gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
couldn't rest, even here. The war cry would follow you.”
“You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art
of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men.”
“Naturally,” said Wyllis, “since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know.”
Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind
through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.
“Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
interesting as Eric Hermannson?”
“Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
fancy.”
“Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I
can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being.”
“Well,” said Wyllis, meditatively, “I don't read Bourget
as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but
I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted
suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a
soul somewhere. _Nicht wahr?_”
“Something like that,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “except that it's
more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and he makes
it known, somehow, without speaking.”
“I always have my doubts about loquacious souls,” Wyllis remarked, with
the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.
Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. “I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein
boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will in anybody. The
earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night
when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that
yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the
dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs.
Lockhart It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some
inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for
him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar
things here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and the
jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived
here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and would
read only the great books that we never get time to read in the world,
and would remember only the great music, and the things that are really
worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
of course I played the intermezzo from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ for him;
it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his
feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he
didn't know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were
tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears.
Then it dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he had
ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does
and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long
for it as we long for other perfect experiences that never come. I
can't tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled
brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his
arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told
it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me.”
“Poor devil,” said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, “and so
you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a girl's
philanthropy for you!”
Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the unusual
luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a
necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry
sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at Margaret.
“Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she isn't
lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will bring his
fiddle--though the French don't mix with the Norwegians much.”
“Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our trip,
and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the Norwegians in
character at last,” cried Margaret, cordially.
“See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this
scheme,” said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
“She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing all
night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage at four
to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton--well, it's tommyrot,
that's what it is!”
“Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide whether
it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three in the
morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir, I prefer to
keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper.”
“But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired of
dancing.”
“So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and I
intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really wants
to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to go to a
party before. It will be something to remember next month at Newport,
when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory that
contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable. This is my
party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in
being nice to the Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you were adept enough
at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many
such young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie
you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them.”
Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
while his sister went on.
“And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?”
Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of his
plowshoe.
“Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard to
get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to the
Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire than shake
'em to a fiddle.”
Margaret made a gesture of impatience. “Those Free Gospellers have just
cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?”
“Well,” said Lockhart, cautiously, “I don't just like to pass judgment
on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by their works,
the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an' that's a fact.
They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've sent a good-sized
delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't see as they've made
the rest of us much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy
last spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but after
the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the little beggar
used to get down on his knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour
and let the cattle get into the corn, an' I had to fire him. That's
about the way it goes. Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler
and the spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now
he's got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can
even get him to come in tomorrow night.”
“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off,” said Margaret,
quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself.”
“I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us out
and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,'” said Lockhart, imitating
the laboured English of the Norwegian.
“'The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!'” chirped
Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
mischievously. “We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am
beaten until I have asked him myself.”
Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the heart
of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay through the most
attractive part of the Divide country, on several occasions Margaret
Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. Tonight Wyllis had business
with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little
mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret
regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always
accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was
a silent one. She was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric
was wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his
head before.
He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as
though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in
his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew
where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared
unto them, never doubted its high origin.
Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid
of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him
when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night,
and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had
followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and
delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's
amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most
dangerous to women.
He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said
of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a
vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian
exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had
repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and
he grew more and more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as
though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which
lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those
Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive,
quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with
others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
heart to die.
Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before
they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where
exiles of all nations grow akin.
The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people
sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that night at
the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his
knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the
gospel of maceration began its work.
_“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,”_ et cetera. The pagan smile
that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it
destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross
has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it
was necessary to starve the soul.
The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that runs
for some three miles through the French settlement, where the prairie
is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and
wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard
poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide
light of the setting sun.
The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, “It will be safe
to run the horses here, won't it?”
“Yes, I think so, now,” he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that
newcomers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken
in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces and try to
outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering
in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and
rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he
had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes,
always with more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said
that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant
lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their
unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these
details. To him this beauty was something more than colour and line;
it was a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour
because all colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a
young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it
troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white
marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods.
At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury
seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing
and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms,
and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break
in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted
the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.
Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he
knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.
Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her
saddle.
“This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,” she said.
Eric turned his eyes away.
“I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music
like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,” he asked,
timidly.
Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
outline of his face, pityingly.
“Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like you
to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
way,” she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: _There he would be
altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's trunks
upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why
is it?_ “No,” she added aloud, “I shouldn't like that.”
“Then I not go,” said Eric, decidedly.
Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a
trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
“But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance
with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they
say you know them all. Won't you?”
Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had
done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his
knee.
“Yes, I will,” he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his
soul to hell as he said it.
They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through
a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs
ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric
rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the
steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and
wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of
Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret's pony made a shrill
sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to
meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant.
Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and
caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was
kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their
forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range
that the little beast fought for.
“Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!” Eric called, throwing all his
weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic forefeet that now
beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs that surged and
tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the pony's head toward him
and crowding her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not
roll.
“Hold tight, tight!” he shouted again, launching a kick at a snorting
animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she should lose
her courage and fall now, under those hoofs--He struck out again and
again, kicking right and left with all his might. Already the negligent
drivers had galloped into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling
over the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling,
frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and on across the
open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony
dropped her head and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and
blood from her bit.
Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her saddle.
“You are not hurt?” he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his face in the
soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and that his lips
were working nervously.
“No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!” she
cried in sharp alarm.
He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.
“No, it is not that,” he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched at
his side. “But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains out with
my hands. I would kill them all. I was never afraid before. You are the
only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came like an
angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the
stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little
boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all
that they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all
eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than
Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for
heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!” He
threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane,
leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some sickness.
His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his laboured breathing. The
horse stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
hand on Eric's head and said gently:
“You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?”
“No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
I will not frighten you again.” His voice was still husky, but it was
steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.
When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head
until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.
“The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
thoroughly scared myself,” she said as she took her brother's arm and
went slowly up the hill toward the house. “No, I'm not hurt, thanks to
Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me. He's a mighty
fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was
pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to bed now. Good night.”
When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the bed
in her riding dress, face downward.
“Oh, I pity him! I pity him!” she murmured, with a long sigh of
exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she took
from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the village
post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand, covering a
dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:
My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say _how like a winter hath
thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious. Really,
it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing better to do, and
not caring to go anywhere in particular without you, I remained in the
city until Jack Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me
down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals
he is getting up. _As You Like It_ is of course the piece selected. Miss
Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the part. Miss
Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or
a tomboy; insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings
and highly coloured suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the emotional
element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and
really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor
says he is _epris_ of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his
memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.
My new pictures arrived last week on the _Gascogne_. The Puvis de
Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a stream of anemic water flows
at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired
it. It is here in all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a
glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as
you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy,
effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of African
coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But
it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove
the charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of
cheapness.
Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this strange
love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with discussions of
pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid them by.
She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open the
window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling suddenly as
though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate desire waiting
to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time,
gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.
“Oh, it is all so little, so little there,” she murmured. “When
everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be great?
Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions into a life like
that? If only I could find one thing in it all that mattered greatly,
one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will life never give me
that one great moment?”
As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes outside.
It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but Margaret started
violently and trembled so that she caught the foot of the bed for
support. Again she felt herself pursued by some overwhelming longing,
some desperate necessity for herself, like the outstretching of
helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with
sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, “I love you more
than Christ who died for me!” ringing in her ears.