“Sleep on,” she said again in a whisper scarcely audible to herself.  “Forget Unorna, if you cannot think of her mercifully and kindly.  Sleep on, you have the right to rest, and I can never rest again.  You have forgiven—­forget, too, then, unless you can remember better things of me than I have deserved in your memory.  Let her take her kingdom back.  It was never mine—­remember what you will, forget at least the wrong I did, and forgive the wrong you never knew—­for you will know it surely some day.  Ah, love—­I love you so—­dream but one dream, and let me think I take her place.  She never loved you more than I, she never can.  She would not have done what I have done.  Dream only that I am Beatrice for this once.  Then when you wake you will not think so cruelly of me.  Oh, that I might be she—­and you your loving self—­that I might be she for one day in thought and word, in deed and voice, in face and soul!  Dear love—­you would never know it, yet I should know that you had had one loving thought for me.  You would forget.  It would not matter then to you, for you would have only dreamed, and I should have the certainty—­for ever, to take with me always!”

As though the words carried a meaning with them to his sleeping senses, a look of supreme and almost heavenly happiness stole over his sleeping face.  But Unorna could not see it.  She had turned suddenly away, burying her face in her hands upon the back of her own chair.

“Are there no miracles left in Heaven?” she moaned, half whispering lest she should wake him.  “Is there no miracle of deeds undone again and of forgiveness given—­for me?  God!  God!  That we should be for ever what we make ourselves!”

There were no tears in her eyes now, as there had been twice that night.  In her despair, that fountain of relief, shallow always and not apt to overflow, was dried up and scorched with pain.  And, for the time at least, worse things were gone from her, though she suffered more.  As though some portion of her passionate wish had been fulfilled, she felt that she could never do again what she had done; she felt that she was truthful now as he was, and that she knew evil from good even as Beatrice knew it.  The horror of her sins took new growth in her changed vision.

“Was I lost from the first beginning?” she asked passionately.  “Was I born to be all I am, and fore-destined to do all I have done?  Was she born an angel and I a devil from hell?  What is it all?  What is this life, and what is that other beyond it?”

Behind her, in his chair, the Wanderer still slept.  Still his face wore the radiant look of joy that had so suddenly come into it as she turned away.  He scarcely breathed, so calmly he slept.  But Unorna did not raise her head nor look at him, and on the carpet near her feet Israel Kafka lay as still and as deeply unconscious as the Wanderer himself.  By a strange destiny she sat there, between the two men in whom her whole life had been wrecked, and she alone was waking.