Some years later his longing drives him again to the Falkenberg estate, but now he is in a different frame of mind. He "plays with muted strings." He still works with his old energy, but his invention, the marvellous saw, has become "literature" to him. Women are "literature." He makes no attempt to approach Fru Falkenberg, but from his obscure place among her other servants he watches mournfully her gradual deterioration and philosophizes over the causes that led to it. The captain and his wife have drifted apart from sheer idleness, because they have no separate pursuits that might take them away from each other and give their hours together the freshness of reunions. In the earlier book, the wife, though she is drifting hither and thither on the breath of longing and discontent, is so essentially true that she feels even the homage of her humble admirer as a danger which she must flee from. When the Wanderer comes back, the idle years have done their work on her. "She had nothing to do, but she had three maids in her house; she had no children, but she had a piano. But she had no children," muses the Wanderer. But while he himself keeps the distance she has imposed upon him, he sees a younger, more brazen admirer pushing himself into her favor. The scruples that bind the man past fifty have no existence for the youth of twenty-two. The Wanderer feels no passion of jealousy, but only a great weary lassitude and loneliness. He knows that for him it is evening. He grieves over her ruin, but can do nothing to avert it. All he can do is to put his whole heart into the humble task of preparing her home against her possible return, helping the captain to paint and refurnish the house. His efforts are of no avail; Fru Falkenberg returns to her husband, but too many fine threads have been broken, and their life together proves impossible.
After her death the Wanderer seeks the solitude of a forest hut, and there he sits looking over his life in retrospect after the fashion of those who know that life is chiefly behind them. "I remember a lady, she guarded nothing, least of all herself. She came to such a bad end. But six or seven years ago I had never believed that any one could be so fine and lovely to another person as she was. I drove her carriage on a journey, and she was bashful before me, although she was my mistress; she blushed and looked down. And the strange thing was that she made me too bashful before her, although I was her servant. Only by looking at me with her two eyes when she gave me an order she revealed to me beauties and values beyond all those I had known before. I remember it even now. Yes. I am sitting here and thinking of it yet, and I shake my head and say to myself: How strange it was, no, no, no! And then she died. What more? Then there is no more. I am left. But that she died ought not to grieve me; I had been paid in advance for that when, without my deserving it, she looked at me with her two eyes." A middle-aged sigh breathes through these words, the sigh of a man who has known life and felt it to be good and who is not avid for more. He is a letter that has arrived and is no longer on the way; that which matters is whether its contents have brought joy or sorrow or whether they have fallen to the ground without making any impression. He has come too late to the berryfields, and there is no more to be said. His only hope is that he may never become senile enough to imagine himself wise because he is old.