When at last I became quieter she once more clasped her hands about my neck, as if to compel my attention, bent forward, and looked long into my eyes with an expression both persuasively eloquent and strong-willed in her beautiful, agitated face.  I must believe, she at last assured me with the quick movement of her head, with which she always emphasised her words, that concerning ourselves she knew a thousand times better than any doctor what God would have, and in this we ought to obey God and not a doctor’s human wisdom.  And I was in many things so intensely simple-minded, that I could be made to believe anything.

People like the doctor, she said, had no idea what love was.  Had I been strong and well, it would certainly have been God’s will that she should have shared the good with me, and so it must just as much be His will that the same love should share my sorrow and sickness; but it was in this that Dr. K.—­he evidently became more and more an object of hatred to her the longer she discussed him—­thought differently from God.  Besides, she believed so surely—­and her voice here became wonderfully gentle and soft, almost a whisper—­that just this, as we two were so fond of one another, would be a better cure for me than anything a doctor could invent.  At any rate, she felt within herself that she would fall ill and give way to despair if I no longer cared for her, for had we not cared for each other as long as we could remember, and it was certainly too late to think of separating us.

One thing must now be settled—­and at the thought her face assumed an expression of determined will, which reminded me of her father—­and that was that, as soon as possible, she would confide everything about our engagement to her father.  It ought, both for my sake and hers, to be no longer a secret.  Her father was very fond of her, and, if need be, she would tell him seriously that it would be of no use either for him, or for anyone else—­by this she meant her mother—­to try any longer to get a doctor to separate us by guile.

Anything like a brotherly and sisterly love between us, as she, with scornful contempt in her look, expressed it, she would not hear of, least of all now, and as if entirely to dispel this idea, she stood upright before me, and asked me, as she looked with passionate eagerness into my face, to say that we still were, and in spite of everything and everybody always should remain, faithfully betrothed, even if I never became so well that we could marry here on earth—­and to give her my kiss upon it.

I took her in my arms, and kissed her warmly and passionately once, twice, three times, until she freed herself.

While she was speaking it had dawned upon me that she, with her strong, healthy, loving nature, had fought the fight for us both and for a right that could not, perhaps, be proved in words, but the sanctity of which, I felt, was beyond all artificial proof.