Some time later a man came in, he was tall and haggard, traces of gray hair, with a restless troubled face. He went over to the child, she jerked convulsively and grew restless. He took a dried herb from the wall and laid its leaves on her hand and she quieted down, droning intelligible words in drawn out, penetrating tones. He recounted how he had heard a voice in the mountains and then had seen sheet lightning over the valleys, he had been seized by it too and had wrestled with it like Jacob. He fell to his knees and quietly prayed with fervor while the sick girl sang in drawn-out, softly lingering tones. Then he went to bed.

Lenz dozed off into dreams and then heard the ticking of the clock in his sleep. Through the quiet singing of the girl and the voice of the old woman came the rushing of the wind, now near, now far, and the moon, now bright, now veiled, threw its shifting light over the room as in a dream. At one point the sounds grew louder, the girl was speaking clearly and distinctly, she was saying how there was a church on a cliff on the other side. Lenz looked up and she was sitting behind the table, eyes wide open, and the moon cast its quiet light on her features from which an unearthly radiance seemed to pour, while the old woman rasped on, and amid this shifting and failing of the light and the singing and the speaking Lenz finally fell fast asleep.

He woke up early, everyone was asleep in the twilit room, even the girl had become quiet, she lay pitched backwards, hands folded under her left cheek; the ghostliness had disappeared from her features, her expression was now one of indescribable suffering. He went to the window and opened it, the cold morning air drove against him. The house lay at the end of a narrow deep valley that opened to the east, red rays shot through the gray dawn sky into the twilit valley that lay in white mist and they glinted on the gray rocks and struck the windows of the huts. The man woke up, his eyes met a picture illuminated on the wall, they stared fixedly at it, now he began to move his lips and prayed quietly, then loudly and ever louder. Meanwhile people came into the hut, they fell to their knees in silence. The girl lay there twitching, the old woman rasped her song and chatted with the neighbors. The people informed Lenz that the man had come to the region long ago, no one knew from where; he was reputed to be a saint, he could see the water under the ground and conjure up spirits, and people made pilgrimages to him. Lenz also learned that he had ended up very far from Steintal, he left with some woodcutters who were headed that way. He was glad to be in company; he had now become increasingly uneasy about the powerful man who seemed at times to be speaking in fearsome tones. Also he was afraid to be with himself when he was alone.

He came home. But the past night had made a powerful impression on him. The world had felt luminous to him, and within himself something was stirring and swarming toward an abyss toward which he was being swept by an inexorable force. He burrowed into himself. He ate little; half the nights in prayer and feverish dreams. The pressure building, and then beaten back in exhaustion; he lay there in hot tears, and then suddenly regained strength and got back up on his feet, cold and calm, his tears like ice to him, he had to laugh. The higher he drove himself the deeper he plunged. Everything streamed back together again. Twinges of his former condition played through him, searchlights cast through the wild chaos of his mind. During the day he usually sat in the room downstairs, Madame Oberlin moved back and forth, he sketched, painted, read, grasped after any distraction. Hastily from one thing to the next. He now especially fastened upon Madame Oberlin as she sat there, her black hymnal before her, next to a house plant, her youngest child between her knees; he also fussed over the child a great deal. He was at one point sitting there and was suddenly seized by anxiety, he sprang to his feet, paced back and forth.