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wondered had they had her; he’d heard tales of men within these very woods taking women brutally, which sickened him, though not as much as his mind’s unwillingness to stop imagining the scene. Her arms and legs were casually tossed over the men’s own arms as they carried her away from him and toward the town.
    He gathered up his books and pens and flowers and leather cap, then hurried to his feet and off to follow her. Even moving, he felt contained in his dream, trailing this buoyant woman as she wafted through the spiny shadows of the nearly undressed autumn trees.
    He heard his name. He heard it called with the same hoarse resonance in which he’d heard this woman scream her rapture.
    It was his mother. She appeared before him suddenly, out of or into his dream, and for a moment he believed he was a small boy again, the night he’d come home from Frau Ruppius and had fallen asleep with the sound of his mother’s singing and awakened in the dark from an unremembered dream to find her standing there, looking at him and saying his name as if she could not believe he was alive, or hers, come home, reality.
    Now she said his name again and again, but without fondness, only anger. She took his arms within her hands and pressed her nails into his flesh and shook him. She was hurting him, and confusing him. Yet even as he tried to absorb what he knew was her suffering, he wanted to break from her grasp and follow the woman who was floating out of sight through the forest.
    â€œShe’s dead,” his mother said.
    â€œLiddy?” Where was the despair? Why was he somehow either relieved or released, he could not quite locate the emotion?
    His mother pushed him from her but did not dig out her fingers. She shook her head and showed him what was in her eyes.
    â€œEmilie!” he cried and tried to break from his mother’s grasp. But she held him and held to him so he could not desert her.
    â€œDrowned,” she said.
    He could not picture it.
    â€œHerself.”
    He took that to mean she had been alone.
    â€œIn the river.”
    He turned around to look at it. He hoped to see her as he might have, if only allowed by serpentine time, Madeleine au Bois d’Amour, alive on the bank of the Aven, painted by her brother who no more knew than Robert did that she, too, would soon be dead.
    His mother, who would not let go of him, turned with him, as in a dance, so now she faced the receding procession in the midst of which her daughter floated dead.
    Robert looked into the River Mulde and knew then what had happened. In the very moments when he had been sitting on its bank, lost within its influence on him, its inspiration, its assurances that through it he was the very questing hero in the book of Nature, his sister had been drowning down around the bend.
    He and his mother followed the body home.
    When his father came out of his study, pipe still lit and spectacles on, he rushed to his daughter and grasped her so hard she nearly fell from the arms of the men who had carried her from the river. Robert could hear some embers from his pipe hiss against the wetness of her dress. His father threw his pipe to the floor, where its stem flew off and bowl shattered, and put his face to his daughter’s breast and locked his arms around her and wept in a way that Robert had never imagined a man might weep. He did not release her until the doctor arrived, and only then at the doctor’s insistence.
    The doctor shook his head sadly and said, “It is for the best.”
    Robert wondered whether the lie was contained within the doctor’s gesture or his words. Angrily, he said, “Save her!”
    The doctor looked at him as if he were mad, or just a child, and turned away and asked, “How did it happen?”
    â€œI was sitting by the river—,” began Robert.
    â€œShe drowned herself,” said one of the men.
    â€œYes. I thought so,” said the doctor.