Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 11).djvu/284



Who knows? It may be that a mother's sorrows and tears were what I needed most. [With still deeper emotion.] But at that time I could not resign myself to my loss; and that was why I took Erhart to me. I won him entirely. Won his whole warm, trustful childish heart—until Oh!

Until what?

Until his mother—his mother in the flesh, I mean—took him from me again.

He had to leave you in any case; he had to come to town.

[Wringing her hands.] Yes, but I cannot bear the solitude—the emptiness! I cannot bear the loss of your son's heart!

[With an evil expression in his eyes.] H'm—I doubt whether you have lost it, Ella. Hearts are not so easily lost to a certain person—in the room below.

I have lost Erhart here, and she has won him back again. Or if not she, some one else. That is plain enough in the letters he writes me from time to time.