On that day Sali felt neither lonesome nor unhappy; where he went and stood Vreni's image followed him and glowed in his inner self; and this without a moment's respite, one hour after another. But while his whole being was engrossed with the lovely image of the girl at the same time its outlines constantly became blurred, so that, after all, he lost the faculty of reproducing it clearly. If he had been asked to describe her in detail he would have been unable to do it. Always he saw her standing near him, with that wizard smile; he felt her warm breath and the whole indefinable charm of her presence, but it was for all that like something which is seen but once and then vanishes forever. Like something the potency of which one cannot escape and yet which one never can know. In dreaming thus he was able to recall fully the features of her when still a tiny maiden, and to experience a most pronounced pleasure in doing so, but the one Vreni of yesterday he could not recall as plainly. If indeed he had never seen Vreni again it might be that his memory would have pieced her personality together, little by little, until not the slightest bit had been wanting. But now all the strength of his mind did not suffice to render him this service, and this was because his senses, his eyes, imperatively demanded their rights and their solace, and when in the afternoon the sun was shining brilliantly and warm, gilding the roofs of all these blackened housetops, Sali almost unconsciously found himself on the way towards his old home in the country, which now seemed to him a heavenly Jerusalem with twelve shining portals, and which set his heart to beating feverishly as he approached it.
While on his way, though, he met Vreni's father, who with hurried and disordered steps was going in the direction of the town. Marti looked wild and unkempt, his gray beard had not been shorn for many weeks, and altogether he presented indeed the picture of what he was: a wicked and lost peasant who had got rid of his land and who now was intent on doing evil to others. Nevertheless, Sali under these radically different circumstances did not regard the crazed old man with hatred but rather with fear and awe, as though his own life was in the hands of this man and as though it were better to obtain it by favor than by force. Marti, however, measured the young man with a black look, glancing at him from his feet upwards, and then he went his way silently. But this encounter came most opportunely to Sali. For seeing the old man leaving the village on an errand it for the first time became quite clear to him what his own object had been in coming. Thus he proceeded stealthily on by-paths towards the village, and when reaching it cautiously felt his way through the small lanes until he had Marti's house and outbuildings right in front of him.