CHAPTER XVI.

Katharine lingered a little while longer at the Skyds-station to comfort, by her sympathetic presence, the brother and friend of the dead Englishman. To the end of their lives they remembered her ministration. She gave out to them royally in generous fashion. It was nothing to her that they were strangers; it was everything to her that they were in trouble and needed a little human kindness. They themselves had forgotten that they were strangers to her. It was a pathetic tribute to her powers of sympathy that they both spoke of the dead man as if she had known him.

"You remember," the brother said, "he never did care for fishing. It always bored him, didn't it?"

"Yes," said Katharine gently.

"Do you remember him saying a few years ago," the friend said, "that he should love to die on the mountains? He always loved the mountains."

"Yes," said Katharine gently.

She scarcely had the heart to leave them; but at last she rose to go, telling them there was an Englishman at the Solli Gaard who spoke Norwegian well, and who would come to help them.

"He is the one for whom we came to seek here," she said, looking away from them. "We are not yet sure that he is safe; but if he comes down from the mountains, I know he will hasten to help you about----"

They bowed their heads silently as she broke off.

"We shall take him home to England," the brother said.

"I am glad he will rest in his own country," Katharine answered.

The people of the Skyds-station fulfilled their promise to Solli, and put Katharine in their best cariole. The two strangers helped her to get in, and then stood watching her. They could not speak. But when she held out her hand in farewell greeting, each man took it and reverently kissed it. She was touched by their silent gratitude, and the tears came into her eyes.

"I am so thankful I stayed behind," she said.

Then the driver, a little fellow of about twelve years old, whipped up the yellow pony, and the Skyds-station was soon out of sight.

"And now, if indeed he has come back, I shall see him," Katharine thought, with a thrill of happiness.

At the Skyds-station, when, by her own choice, she was left alone, she had for the moment felt the bitterness of being outside everything. She remembered her own words:

"He will come down from the mountains, and the joy of reunion will be theirs, and I shall be outside of it--outside of it as always. Always outside the heart of things."

That moment had been only one of the many times of passing sadness and bitterness in Katharine's life, when she had said and felt that she was outside everything: outside the inner heart of friendship which never fails, outside ambitious achievement, outside the region of great gifts, great talents, outside the magic world of imagination, outside love. Her friend had died, her girlhood's lover had died, her brother had failed her. She was alone, a solitary spectator of other people's close friendships, passionate love, successful work, absorbing careers; alone, outside the barrier which separates all restless yearning spirits from that dim Land of Promise; alone, outside. She, ever unconscious of her own genius of giving, had no means of knowing that, by a mysterious dispensation, those who give of themselves royally, without measure, are destined to go out alone into the darkness of the night; alone, outside everything in life.

But no such sad reflections came to Katharine now, as she sped along the narrow valley, by the side of the glacier-river. Her thoughts turned to Clifford and Knutty and Alan in loving unselfishness.

"The boy will have seen his dear father, and will now be comforted," she said.

"Knutty will have seen her Englishman, and will now raise her old head again," she said.

"Ah, how I hope and hope he was there to receive them when they got back to the Gaard," she said.

"And now I shall see him, and the joy of reunion will be mine," she said.

But in the midst of her happy thoughts and yearnings, she did not forget those two lonely compatriots and that silent companion in the bedroom of the Skyds-station.

"My poor strangers," she said, "we will not forsake you."

They had come to the place where the sudden break in the valley had cheered them during that terrible drive of the morning.

"Yes," thought Katharine, "that gave us hope this morning. I should recognise this spot anywhere on earth. It was here I began to have a strong belief that it could not be he lying dead at the Skyds-station."

"Oh," she thought, with a shudder, "if it had been he!--if it had been he!"

And her own words echoed back to her as an answer:

"My womanhood would be buried with my girlhood."

Then she looked up and saw a carriage in the distance, in the far distance. The boy also saw it. As it approached nearer he said:

"It is from the Solli Gaard. That is Jens driving."

Katharine's heart gave a sudden bound.

"Haste, haste!" she said excitedly to the boy; and he, moved by her eagerness, urged on the little yellow pony, which rose to the occasion and flew over the ground.

Carriage and cariole drew up at the same moment, and Katharine saw face to face the man whom she loved.

"We came to fetch you," he said.