them what they would give and finally, amid the general laughter, solemnly knocked it down to his brother.  He had brought it to her and told her about it while they were dancing and Apollonius had looked in at the hall window, mockingly, as his brother had said.  That one she had pulled to pieces; all the young people had danced over the ruins.  The blossom in the box was another one.  The letter must tell from whom it was or to whom Apollonius sent it.

And yet it was the same flower.  She read it.  What feelings took possession of her as she read that it was the same one.  Tear after tear fell on the paper and out of them mounted a rosy haze and veiled the narrow walls of the little room.  Oh, it was a world of happiness, of laughing and crying with happiness that rose from the tears; every one shone more like a rainbow, every one cried:  “She was yours!” And the last one lamented:  “And she has been stolen from you!” The flower was from her; he carried it on his breast in yearning, hope, and fear, until she of whom he thought when he touched it had become his brother’s.  He was so good that he had thought it a sin to keep the poor blossom away from the man who had stolen the giver from him.  And she might have clung to such a man, might have enfolded him in the arms of her yearning and never let him go!  She could have done it, might have done it, should have done it!  It would not have been a sin; it would have been a sin if she had not done so.  And now it was a sin because the other had defrauded him and her, the other who now tormented her about what he himself had made sinful, who forced her to sin—­for be forced her to hate him, and that too was a sin and his fault.  With terribly sweet fear she thought of the nearness of the man who should be a stranger to her, who was not a stranger to her, from whom in the dread of her weakness she saw no escape.  She fled from him, from herself, into the room where her children slept, where her mother had died.  There, where such peace had come to her, she heard the slight movement of the innocent little slumberers whose guardian God had made her, heard their quiet breathing whispering into the still, dark night.  She went from bed to bed, sank motionless on her knees before each, and pressed her forehead against the sharp edges of the bedsteads.

From the tower of St. George’s the bells rang as the step of time passed over her; and he did not cease his march.  She lay, her hot hands clasped, a long, long time.  Then from the gentle web of her feelings there rose, silvery as the sound of Easter morning bells, the thought:  why are you afraid of him?  And she saw all her angels kneeling About her and he was one of her angels, the most beautiful and the strongest and the gentlest.  And she might look up to him as one looks up to his angels.  She rose and went back into the other room.  She spread the letters out on the table and then laid herself to rest.  She meant their possessor to know, when he came home and found the letters, that she had read them.  It was hard for her to part with them; but they did not belong to her.  She took away only the little box with the withered flower, and meant to tell him in the morning that she had done so.