Agathe thought: “All this was his doing, he alone made it happen; and yet he doubts every time he smiles!” But the sun was steadily pouring its warmth on his parted lips, tenderly, like a sleeping potion; Agathe felt it on her own lips and knew herself to be at one with him. She tried to put herself in his place and guess his thoughts, which was something they had come to regard as impermissible, because it was an intrusion and not the result of creative participation; but as a deviation it was that much more secret. “He doesn’t want this to become just another love story,” she thought; and added: “That suits my taste too.” And then she thought: “He won’t love another woman after me, because this is no longer a love story; it’s in fact the last possible love story!” And she added: “I suppose we’ll be something like the Last Mohicans of love!” At the moment, she was capable of this self-mocking tone, for if she was completely honest, the enchanted garden in which she found herself together with Ulrich was also, of course, more a wish than a reality. She did not really believe that the Thousand-Year Kingdom could have begun, despite the sound of terra firma in the name Ulrich had given it. She even felt quite deserted by her powers of desire, and wherever it was that her dreams came from, bitterly sobered. She remembered times, before she met Ulrich, when she had actually found it easier to imagine that a waking sleep like the one in which her soul was now being gently rocked would be able to escort her behind life to a wakefulness after death, close to God, where powers would come to fetch her, or just take her alongside life to a cessation of ideas and a passage to forests and meadows of imagination: it had never become clear what that was! So now she made an effort to recall those old visions. But all she could remember was a hammock suspended between two enormous fingers and rocked with infinite patience; then a calm state of being overtowered, as if by high trees between which she felt herself lifted up and removed from sight; and finally a Nothing, which in some incomprehensible way had a tangible content: —All these were probably the mixtures of intuition and fantasy in which her longing had found consolation. But was that really all they amounted to, mere hybrids or halves? For to her astonishment, Agathe was gradually beginning to notice something quite remarkable. “Truly,” she thought, “it’s just like the expression: It dawns on you! And the light keeps spreading the longer it lasts!” For what she had once imagined seemed to be present in almost everything that now stood around her in abiding calm, no matter how often she sent out a glance for confirmation. It had entered the world without a sound. To be sure, God—differently from the way a literalist believer might have experienced it—had absented Himself from her adventure, but to make up for that, this adventure was one in which she was no longer alone: those were the only two changes that distinguished the fulfillment from the premonition, and these changes were in favor of earthly naturalness.