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They had come to the end of the wood. From the gate they had a greatview over the open landscape. After the green sombreness of the forest, the world outside seemed unbelievably light, as if bleached by the luminous dimness of midday. But after awhile, the colours of fields, meadows, and dispersed groups of trees defined themselves to the eye, one by one. There was a faint blue light in the sky, and faint, white, cumulus clouds rose along the horizon. The young green rye in the fields was about to ear; where the finger of the breeze touched it, it ran in long, gentle billows along the ground. The small, thatched peasants’ houses lay like lime-white, square isles within the undulating land; round them the lilac-hedges bore up their light foliage and, at the top, clusters of pale flowers. They heard the rolling of a carriage on the road in the distance, and above their heads the incessant singing of innumerable larks.

By the edge of the forest, there lay a wind-felled tree. Emilie said,"Let us sit down here a little. "

She loosened the ribbons of her bonnet and laid it in her lap. After aminute, she said: "
There is something I want to tell you," and made along pause.

All through this conversation in the wood she behaved in the same way,with a long silence before each phrase—not exactly as if she werecollecting her thoughts, but as if she were finding speech in itselflaborious or deficient.

She said: "The boy was my own child. "

"What are you talking about?" Jakob asked her.

"Jens," she said, "he was my own child. Do you remember telling me that when you saw him the first time, you though he was like me? He was indeed like me; he was my son. "

Now Jakob might have been frightened, and believed her to be out of her mind. But lately, to him, things had come about in unexpected ways, he was prepared for the paradoxical. So he sat quietly on the truck, and looked down at the young beech shoots in the ground.

"My dear," he said, "my dear, you do not know what you say. "

She was silent awhile, as if distressed by his interruption of her train of thought. "It is difficult for other people to understand, I know," she said at last, patiently; "if Jens had been here still, he might perhaps have made you understand, better than I. But try," she went on, "to understand me. I have thought that you ought to know. And if I cannot speak to you, I cannot speak to anyone. " She said this with a kind of grave concern, as if really threatened by total incapacity of speech.

He remembered how, during these last weeks, he had felt her silence heavy on him, and had tried to make her speak of something,—of anything.

"No, my dear," he said, "you speak, I shall not interrupt you. "

Gently, as if thankful for his promise, she began: "He was my child,and Charlie Dreyer’s. You met Charlie once in Papa’s house. But it waswhile you were in China that he became my lover. "

At these words, Jakob remembered the anonymous letter he had once received. As he recalled his own indignant scouting of the slander and the care with which he had kept it from her, it seemed to him a curious thing that after five years, he was to have it repeated by her own lips.