Although it gave him a pleasant feeling to know she was doing something for his sake he also felt an intense displeasure at not being able to see her at once. His impatience increased with every minute that passed. He paced up and down the drawing-room, he tried to interest himself in this or that, but nothing was able to hold his attention. He wanted to see her and see her alone before Charlotte came back with the Captain. Night came on and the candles were lit.

At last she came in. She looked radiant. The feeling of having done something for her friend had exalted her whole being. She laid her copy and the original on the table in front of Eduard. ‘Shall we collate them?’ she asked, smiling. Eduard did not know what to reply. He looked at her, he examined the copy. The first pages were written with the greatest care in a delicate feminine hand; then the characters seemed to change, to grow freer, easier. But he was astonished when he came to look at the last pages. ‘My God!’ he exclaimed, ‘what’s this! It is my handwriting!’ He looked at Ottilie and again at the pages. The end of the copy especially was just as if he had written it himself. Ottilie stayed silent, but looked at him with an expression of the greatest satisfaction. Eduard flung up his arms. ‘You love me!’ he cried. ‘Ottilie, you love me!’ And they embraced one another and held one another embraced. And which first embraced the other you would not have been able to say.

From this moment the world was transformed for Eduard, he was no longer what he had been, the world was no longer what it had been. They stood face to face, he holding her hands, they looked into one another’s eyes, they were about to embrace again.

Charlotte came in with the Captain. At their apologies for staying out so long Eduard smiled quietly to himself. ‘Not at all, you have come back too soon, oh how much too soon!’ he said to himself.

They sat down to supper. The people who had visited them that day were discussed and adjudged. Eduard, excited by love, spoke well of them all, indulgently and often approvingly. Charlotte, who was not altogether in agreement, noticed this mood of his and remarked jokingly that he usually let the judgement of his tongue fall very heavily on departing company but today he was being so gentle and forbearing.

With great warmth and heartfelt conviction Eduard exclaimed: ‘If you love one person, love from the very heart, all other people seem lovable too!’ Ottilie lowered her eyes and Charlotte looked straight ahead.

The Captain took up the conversation and said: ‘It is somewhat the same with feelings of respect and admiration. You know how to recognize what is to be valued in society only when such sentiments have been aroused in you towards a single object.’

Charlotte went early to her bedroom so as to give herself up to the recollection of what had happened that evening between her and the Captain.

When Eduard, jumping on to the bank, had pushed the boat out from the land and had himself delivered up wife and friend to the uncertain element, Charlotte then had the man on whose account she had secretly suffered so much sitting before her in the twilight moving the boat on with the two oars in the direction he had decided to go. She felt very sad, she had seldom felt such a sensation of sadness. The circling of the boat, the splash of the oars, the chill breath of the wind across the surface of the water, the murmur of the reeds, the birds hovering over the water for the last time before the darkness came on, the first stars flashing and flashing again in the sky – these all had something spectral about them in that universal stillness. It seemed to her as if her friend was taking her a long way away to leave her in some distant place.