“I am twenty-nine and there has been no beautiful or happy experience in my life but that short spring spent with you. Can you not understand that I have never been able to separate you from my thoughts, that I love you as before? The only happiness I have known is that you gave me. I cannot let you go out of my life—not now.”
She got up, trembling, and he rose too. Instinctively she drew back a few steps from him:
“You say there has been another—and it could have been I. I don’t care; I want you all the same. I want you now because you promised me once to be mine.”
Terrified, she tried to go past him, but he seized her violently in his arms. It took a few seconds for her brain to realize that he was kissing her mouth. She thought she made a resistance, but was in fact almost passive in his arms. She wanted to tell him not to, and she wanted to say who the other had been, but she could not. She would have told him about the child, but when she remembered the boy she shrank from mentioning him; she felt she must not drag her child into the disaster she knew was coming. As this thought crossed her mind she imagined she felt the dead little one caressing her, and it gave her a sensation of joy, so that her body relaxed for a second in his arms.
“You are mine—mine only—yes, yes, Jenny!”
She tore herself away from him and, running to the door, she called aloud for Gunnar. Helge was at her side again in an instant, taking her back in his arms.
They wrestled with each other by the door without a word. It seemed to Jenny that her life depended on her opening it and escaping into Gunnar’s room, but feeling Helge close to her, stronger than she, as he held her, it seemed to her that there was no escape—and at last she gave way.
In the grey morning light, he came over to her to kiss her:
“My glorious Jenny. How wonderfully beautiful you are. You are mine now, and everything will come right, will it not? Oh, I love you so.
“Are you tired? You must sleep when I have gone, and I will come to see you again at noon. Sleep soundly, my darling Jenny. Are you so tired?”
She was lying with her eyes half closed, looking at the pale morning light coming through the ribs of the blind.
He kissed her when he stood fully dressed, holding his hat; then he kneeled by her bed and put an arm under her shoulder: