In haar hart hoop Adelaide dat hy haar gaan vra om saam met hom te gaan.
Sy sien dat hy wil, maar dit nie gaan doen nie,
"You" she said slowly, "and I"
Ib was to keep these words in his mind all his life. But they had, there, a mysterious quality to him: they evaded definition, when looked at straightly they changed and vanished. As, in Aunt Nathalie’s room, he heard them for this first time, they were a verdict, the placing of her and him with the unbridgeable distance between them. At a later time, when he thought them over, there was, surprisingly, in the word of “You,” a note of compassion and in the word of “I” a plaintive note, like the lament of a child. In Jutland, when in rainy spring nights the complaint of the curlew is heard, first from one side and then from another, the peasants will tell you that this is the dialogue of two dead lovers who long ago have forfeited their happiness and are now wailingly reproaching each other with their loss. There were hours in which Adelaide sang to Ib in the voice of the curlew. In the end, at that moment in which he was to thank her for having existed, the words took on the ring of a magic spell, uniting her and him for eternity.
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