When she looked up, a man was standing near her. She was embarrassed, for she did not know how long he had been watching her. When her glance, still darkened by excitement, slid across his, she noticed that he was observing her with unconcealed sympathy and apparently wanted to instill her with hearty confidence: The man was tall and gaunt, wore dark clothes, and a short blond beard covered his chin and cheeks. Beneath this beard one could discern soft, slightly pouting lips whose youthfulness contrasted oddly with the gray hair that was already mingling with the blond, as if age had overlooked them beneath the growth of facial hair. This face was altogether difficult to decipher. The first impression suggested a secondary-school teacher; the sternness in this face was not carved out of hard wood but was rather like something soft that had been toughened amid daily little vexations. But if one took as one’s point of departure this very softness, in which the manly beard appeared like a thing implanted to satisfy a convention its wearer believed in, one realized that in this perhaps somewhat womanish foundation there were hard, almost ascetic details, evidently shaped out of that soft material by a ceaselessly active will.

Agathe did not know what to make of this face, which held her in suspension between attraction and repulsion. She understood only that this man wanted to help her.

“Life offers as much opportunity to strengthen the will as it does to weaken it,” the stranger said, wiping his fogged eyeglasses in order to see better. “One should never flee from difficulties but should seek to master them!” Agathe looked at him in astonishment. Clearly he must have been watching her for a long time, for these words came from the midst of an inner conversation. Suddenly startled, he lifted his hat, making good his failure to perform that indispensable courtesy earlier; but he quickly regained his composure and proceeded straightforwardly. “Pardon my asking if I can help you,” he said. “It seems to me that emotional pain, indeed often even a shocking injury to the self, such as I am witnessing here, is more easily confided to a stranger!”

It appeared that the stranger was not speaking without effort; he seemed to have been fulfilling a charitable duty in engaging with this beautiful woman, and now that they were walking side by side, he was positively struggling with his words. For Agathe had simply stood up and begun slowly walking away from the grave, and he with her, out from among the trees into the open space by the edge of the hills, undecided whether they would now take one of the paths leading downward, or if they did, which one. Instead they walked a considerable way along the hillside in conversation; then they turned around, and then they walked again in the first direction, neither of them knowing where the other had intended to go, and each willing to yield to the other’s choice. “Won’t you tell me why you were weeping?” the stranger repeated with the mild voice of a doctor asking where it hurts. Agathe shook her head. “It wouldn’t be easy to explain,” she said, and suddenly asked him: “But I have a question for you: What makes you so sure that you can help me without knowing me? I should think that one can’t help anyone!”