The Second VisitThe fisher and his wife had in seventeen years no more visitors to their solitude on the marge of the lake; and probably for just as long a time before that. The more lively, though they never spoke of it, was the memory of the one they had once received, the husband with anger and bad words, the wife with pious intuitions. I will add that the man did not in the least want to remember the visit and shoved it out of his mind as much as possible. For in retrospect it always seemed to him, though actually he had at that time done just what the strange man wanted, as though he had committed something like a crime—in short, a murder. And one would rather banish such ideas. He did not succeed badly, indeed, so far as the upper layer of his consciousness went, for after all he did
