Page:Love's trilogy.djvu/196

 bitter disappointment, I could now perhaps even hope for deliverance.

2em

F late I have often been in Fredericksberg Park. It is so beautiful there just now when the leaves are dying in the most wonderful colouring, carried golden to the earth by singing sunbeams.

I quite understand why this garden is much frequented by old people and lonely souls. At its fence the noise of the town stops, and the park is an asylum for quiet thoughts and quiet sorrows. It is a graveyard of sweet memories and broken illusions.

Every day I meet the same people. It is as if I knew them all, and I seem also to know why they come here. There is the old neatly-clothed gentleman whose mouth always moves in the angry, white face, and who incessantly beats the air with his stick. What can he be but a late civil service man who continues his fury against his—to him—unjust dismissal? And does one need to ask what the tall, slender lady, dressed in black, is thinking of? She comes with her young daughter, who is also in mourning, and she smiles faintly and absent-mindedly at the young girl's chatter. Or she, the young cripple, who is wheeled along the path by a tired, worn-out motherly person.

Or I myself? Do not the others suspect the fate which has made me a member of their little community?