recriminations are only a vain attempt to drown the voice of
self-reproach. In a sort of fierce frenzy they tear away veil after
veil from their souls, until they realise that Eyolf never existed
at all, so to speak, for his own sake, but only for the sake of
their passions and vanities. "Isn't it curious," says Rita, summing
up the matter, "that we should grieve like this over a little
stranger boy?"

In blind self-absorption they have played with life and death, and
now "the great open eyes" of the stranger boy will be for ever upon
them. Allmers would fain take refuge in a love untainted by the
egoism, and unexposed to the revulsions, of passion. But not only
is Asta's pity for Rita too strong to let her countenance this
desertion: she has discovered that her relation to Allmers is _not_
"exempt from the law of change," and she "takes flight from him--
and from herself." Meanwhile it appears that the agony which
Allmers and Rita have endured in probing their wounds has been, as
Halvard Solness would say, "salutary self-torture." The consuming
fire of passion is now quenched, but "it, has left an empty place
within them," and they feel it common need "to fill it up with
something that is a little like love." They come to remember that
there are other children in the world on whom reckless instinct has
thrust the gift, of 1ife--neglected children, stunted and maimed in
mind if not in body. And now that her egoism is seared to the
quick, the mother-instinct asserts itself in Rita. She will take
these children to her--these children to whom her hand and her
heart have hitherto been closed. They shall be outwardly in Eyolf's
place, and perhaps in time they may fill the place in her heart
that should have been Eyolf's. Thus she will try to "make her peace
with the great open eyes." For now, at last, she has divined the