mill. Great-Ola and Aslak, the crofter, went with them--something was

to be done to the mill-wheel, now that the stream was almost dry.

They stood there studying eagerly how the wheel could best be raised off the axis.

"That Jörgen, that Jörgen, he has got the hang of the wheel!" exclaimed the captain. "You can get Tore, the joiner, to help, Ola, as soon as you come back with the horses from the mountain--and let Jörgen show you how: he understands it, he does--if it is only not a book, he is clever enough."

"You will have to take hold of your forelock and try and cram, Jörgen; do as you did with the rye-pudding--the sooner it is eaten, the sooner it is over," said Grip, to comfort him.

"Look here, I came near forgetting the fish-lines for to-morrow. You will have to go down to the store this evening, Jörgen. We catch the trout ourselves up there, as you will see," said the captain, turning to Grip.

"Oh--oh--yes," he puffed, while they were sauntering toward home together. "I certainly need to go to the mountains now, I always come down again three or four pounds lighter."

"I have wandered about that part of the country from the time I was a schoolboy," remarked Grip. "We must put Lake Bygdin into the geography--that it was discovered only a few years ago, in the middle of a broad mountain plateau, which only some reindeer hunter or other knew anything about."

"Not laid down on any map, no--as blank as in the interior of Africa, marked out as unexplored," the captain pointed out. "But then there is traffic going on between the districts, both of people and cattle, and the mountains have their names from ancient times down among the common people."

"True, the natives also knew the interior of Africa, but on that account it is not called discovered by the civilized world," said Grip, smiling. "I always wondered what could be found in such a mysterious region in the middle of the country. There might be a great deal there: valleys entirely deserted from ancient times--old, sunken timber halls, and then wild reindeer rushing here and there over the wastes."

"Yes, shooting," agreed the captain; "we get many a tender reindeer steak from over there."

"It was that which attracted me, when I met the reindeer hunter two years ago: I wanted to explore a little, to see what there was there."

"Exactly like all that we imagined about the city," exclaimed Inger-Johanna.

"You ought to go with your father part of the way over the mountains, Miss Inger-Johanna--see if you could find some lofty bower."

"That is an idea, not at all stupid," broke in the captain, "not impossible, not at all! You could ride all the way to the Grönnelid _saeters_."

"Ah, if you could carry that through, father!" she exclaimed earnestly. "Now I have also taken a fancy to see what there is there--I believe we always thought the world ended over there at our own _saeter_ pastures."

"I have some blankets on the pack-saddle, and where they can get a roof over my head there will be room enough for you too.--Come, come, Morten, will you let people alone!" The captain took out a roll of tobacco and held a piece out to the stable goat, that was coming, leaping, towards them from the yard. "There, mumble-beard--he will have his allowance, the rascal.--Ma," he called, when he saw her coming from the storehouse, "what would you say if I should take Inger-Johanna with me to-morrow? Then they will have company home on Friday with Ola and the horses--she and Jörgen."

"But, dear Jäger, why should she go up there?"

"She can pass the night at Grönnelid _saeter_."

"Such a fatiguing trip! It is absolutely without a path and wild where you must go."

"She can ride the horse a good ways beyond the _saeter_. Svarten will go as steady as a minister with her and the pack-saddle--both on the mountain and in the bog. I will take the dun horse myself." He had become very eager at the prospect of taking her with him. "Certainly, you shall go. You must put a good lot in the provision bag, Ma. We must be off early to-morrow at five o'clock. Tronberg will join us with a horse farther up, so there will be a way of giving you a mount also, Grip."

Grip started on a run with Jörgen towards the yard, finally caught him, and drove him in through the open kitchen window.

The captain, with his neck burned brown, toiled, red and sweating in his shirt-sleeves, in the mountain fields up under Torsknut.

The packhorses went first with Inger-Johanna and all the equipment, and by the side of the captain walked some farmers who carried their coats on sticks over their shoulders on account of the heat, and eagerly pointed out bounds and marks, every time they stopped and he was to draw some line or other as a possible connection.

They had passed the night at the Grönnelid _saeters_ and been out on the moors making a sketch survey at five o'clock in the morning, had ridden over flat mountain wastes among willow thickets, while the horses, step by step, waded across windings of the same river.

Now they stopped again after a steep ascent to wait for Tronberg, whom they had seen below on the hills.

The captain took out his spy-glass, and after a cursory glance over the shining icy fields which lay like a distant sea of milk, turned it farther and farther down.

The perspiration rolled in great drops off his forehead and eyelids, so that the glass was blurred, and he was obliged to wipe it again with his large, worn silk handkerchief.

Then he rested the spy-glass on the back of the packhorse, and held it still a long time. "That must be the Rognelid folk, after all, who are moving there west of Braekstad heights. What do you say?"

The people to whom he turned needed only to shade their eyes to agree with him that it was the opposite party whom they were to meet the next morning at Lake Tiske. But they were too polite fellows to express it otherwise than by saying in a flattering manner, "What a spy-glass the captain has!"

During this surveying business he was borne, so to speak, on a royal cushion by the anxious interests of both parties to the contest; it contributed to the pleasure he took in his trips in the mountains in summer to feel himself in that way lifted up by their hands.

"Have you been fishing, Tronberg?" he shouted when the head of the subaltern's "Rauen" appeared nodding down in the steep path. "Trout! Caught to-day?"

"This morning, Captain."

The captain took up the string and looked at the gills. "Yes, they are to-day's."

The subaltern took off his hat, and dried his forehead and head. "One could easily have fried the fish on the rocky wall in the whole of that pan of a valley over there that I came through," Tronberg said.

"Fine fish. See that, Grip,--weighs at least three pounds."

"Goodness sake, the young lady here!" exclaimed the subaltern, involuntarily bringing himself up to a salute when Inger-Johanna turned her horse round and looked at the shiny speckled fish which hung on the pack-saddle.

But old Lars Opidalen, the one who had asked for the survey, gently passed his coarse hand over hers, while he counted the trout on the willow branch. "Can such also be of the earth?" he said, quietly wondering.

"Help the young lady, Lars, while she dismounts: it is not well to ride any longer on this smooth bare rock."

The path ascended, steeper and steeper, with occasional marshy breathing places in between--it was often entirely lost in the gray mountain.

The mournful cry of a fish eagle sounded over them. It circled around, cried, and went off when Jörgen shouted at it. It must have had a nest somewhere up on that rocky wall.

The captain's shotgun was brought out, and Tronberg attempted a shot, but could not get within range. If he could only lie in wait for it behind the great stones up here!

The eagle whirled around again near them with broad, outspread wings.

Suddenly there was a report up above on the slope strewn with stones, and the eagle made some vigorous, flapping strokes with its wings; it struggled so as not to fall down.

The shot had gone through one wing, so that daylight could be seen through the hole in the feathers. The bird evidently found it difficult to preserve its equilibrium.

"What a shame!--it is wounded," exclaimed Inger-Johanna.

"Who shot?" demanded the captain, taken aback.

"Jörgen ran off with the rifle," Tronberg replied.

"Jörgen! He can't make me believe it was his first shot, the rogue! But he shot himself free from a thrashing that time--for it was a good shot, Tronberg. The rascal! He has been most strictly forbidden to meddle with guns."

"Forbidden indeed," murmured Grip. "Is it not remarkable, Miss Inger-Johanna, it is always the forbidden thing in which we are most skilful? It is exactly these prohibitions that constitute our most potent education--But that is going the way of villains in growth, and leaves its marks behind--makes men with good heads but bad characters."

Grip and Inger-Johanna walked ahead with the horses. A strange, hazy warm smoke lay below over the marshes in the afternoon: it veiled the lines there. Up here on the mountain the air was so sparkling clear.

Foot by foot, the animals picked their way over the piles of stony débris between the enormous fallen masses which lay, scattered here and there, like moss-covered gray houses, with now and then a fairy forelock of dwarf birch upon them, while on the mountain ledges still hung yellow tufts of saxifrage.

"Only see all this warped, twisted, fairy creation. You could say that life is really turned to stone here,--and yet it bubbles up."

He stopped. "Do you know what I could wish, Miss Inger-Johanna?" There was no longer any trace of the strain of irony which usually possessed him. "Simply to be a schoolmaster!--teach the children to lay the first two sticks across by their own plain thoughts. It is the fundamental logs that are laid the wrong way in us. They ought to be allowed to believe just as much and as little as they could really swallow. And to the door with the whole host of these cherished, satisfactory prohibitions! I should only show the results--mix powder and matches together before their eyes till it went into the air, and then say, 'If you please, Jörgen, so far as I am concerned, you can go with the two things in your pocket as much as you like: it is you, yourself, who will be blown into the air.' It is the sense of responsibility that is to be cultivated while the boy is growing up, if he is to be made a man."

"You have an awful lot of ideas, Grip."

"Crotchets, you mean? If I had any talent with the pen,--but I am so totally dependent on word of mouth. You see, there are only four doors, and they are called theology, philology, medicine, and law, and I have temporarily knocked at the last. What I want there, I don't know. Have you heard of the cat which they put into a glass ball and pumped the air out? It noticed that there was something wrong. It was troubled for breath; the air was constantly getting thinner and thinner; and so it put one paw on the hole. I shall also allow myself to put one paw on the draught hole--for here is a vacuum--not up in the skies with the poets, of course. There it lightens and shines, and they write about working for the people and for freedom and for everything lofty and great in as many directions as there are points on a compass--but in reality, down on the earth--for a prosaic person who would take hold and set in motion a little of the phrases--there it is entirely closed. There is no use for all our best thoughts and ideas in the practical world, I can tell you; not even so much that a man can manage to make himself unhappy in them.

"And so one lives as best he can his other life with his comrades, and re-baptizes himself in punch with them every time he has been really untrue to himself in the tea parties. But taste this air--every blessed breath like a glass of the finest, finest--nay, what shall I call it?"

"Punch," was the rather short answer.

"No, life! With this free nature one does not feel incited to dispute. I am in harmony with the mountain, with the sun, with all these crooked tough birch-osiers. If people down there only were themselves! But that they never are, except in a good wet party when they have got themselves sufficiently elevated from the bottom of the well. There exists a whole freemasonry, the members of which do not know each other except in that form, or else in Westerman's steam baths when Westerman whips us with fresh birch leaves in a temperature of eighty degrees. The bath-house was our fathers' national club, did you know that?"

"No, indeed; I am learning a great many new things, I think," she said, with half concealed humor.

"Listen, listen! The golden plover whistling," whispered Jörgen.

The sound came from a little marshy spot which was white with cotton grass.

They stood listening.

"Did you ever hear anything so tremendously quiet," said Grip, "after a single little peep. There are such peeps here and there in the country. Abel, he died, he did--of what? Of drink, they said"--he shook his head--"of vacuum."

He was walking in his shirt-sleeves, and flung the willow stick, which he had broken off while he was talking, far down over the rocky incline.

"There, Captain, see the line, as it has been from ancient times for Opidalen," shouted old Lars--"straight, straight along by the Notch, where we shall go down and across the lake--straight toward Rödkampen on Torsknut--there where you see the three green islands under the rocks, Captain." He shook his stick in his eagerness. "For that I shall bring witnesses--and if they were all living here who have fished on our rights in the lake, both in my father's and grandfather's time, there would be a crowd of people against their villainies in Rognelien."

The afternoon shadows fell into the Notch, where the ice-water trickled down through the cracks in the black mountain wall. Here and there the sun still shone on patches of greenish yellow reindeer moss, on some violet, white, or yellow little clusters of high mountain flowers, which exemplified the miracle of living their tinted life of beauty up here close to the snow.

"There comes Mathis with the boat," exclaimed old Lars.

The boat, which was to carry them over to the shelter, crept like an insect far below them on the green mirror of the lake.

The going down was real recreation for the captain's rather stout body, short of breath as he was, and the prospect of being able to indulge in his favorite sport, fishing, contributed greatly to enlivening his temper.

"We are coming here just at the right time: they will bite," he suggested.

When they embarked in the square trough, which was waiting for them down by the fishing-hut, he had the line ready. He had already, with great activity, taken care of the bait, carried in a goat's horn.

Those of the train who could not be accommodated in the boat went around the lake with the horses. They saw them now and then on the crags, while they rowed out.

"What do you say to a trial along the shore there in the shade, Mathis? Don't you think they will take the hook there?--We are not rowing so straight over at once, I think," said the captain slyly.

Under the thwarts Mathis's own line was lying; and Inger-Johanna also wanted to try her hand at it.

The captain put the bait on for her. But she would not sit and wait till they reached the fishing place; she threw the line out at once and let it trail behind the boat, while, as they rowed, she, off and on, gave a strong pull at it.

"See how handy she is," exclaimed the captain; "it is inborn--you come from a race of fishermen, for I was brought up in the Bergen district, and my father before me. If I had a dollar for every codfish I have pulled out of Alverströmmen, there would be something worth inheriting from me--What! what!"

A swirl was heard far behind in the wake. Inger-Johanna gave a vigorous pull; the yellow belly of a fish appeared a moment in the sunlight above the surface of the water.

She continued, after the first feverish jerk upon the line, in a half risen position, to pull it in.

When she lifted the shining fish high upon the edge of the boat, she burst out into a triumphant cry, "The first fish I have ever caught!"

Grip took the fish off the hook, and threw it far off. "Then it shall also be allowed to keep its life!"

The captain angrily moved his heavy body, so that it shook the boat. But that the ill-timed offering to the deep was made for the honor of the apple of his eye greatly mitigated the stupidity.

And when they got in under the knoll, where he cast his line, he suddenly sang a verse from his youthful recollections of the Bergen quarter, which had slumbered in him for many a long year.

_I lay basking in the sun, While the boat was drifting in the current, I heard the sillock and climbed into the top, I was giddy with my dream. I awoke wet through, And the thwart was floating, While the boat was drifting in the current._

His deep bass came out with full force in the silence under the knoll.

The lake was like a mirror, and the captain took one trout after another.

Torsknut, with patches and fields of snow on the summit, stood on its head deep down below them, so that it almost caused a giddy feeling when they looked out over the boat-rail. And when they arrived under the cattle station, the steep green mountain side, with all the grazing cattle, was reproduced so clearly that they could count the horns in the water.

"Nay, here the cows walk like flies on the wall," said the captain. "If the milk-bucket falls up there, it will roll down to us into the boat."

The shelter was, in fact, nothing more than a little mud hut on the rocky slope, and a little wooden shed, with boulders on the roof, and a hole in it. There the captain was to be quartered, and Inger-Johanna was to sleep till the sun rose, and she, with Jörgen, Great-Ola, and Svarten, should go back again to the Grönnelid _saeters_.

They had eaten supper--the trout and an improvised cream porridge--and were now standing, watching the sun set behind the great mountains.

The captain was going about on the turf, in slippers and unbuttoned uniform coat, smoking his pipe with extreme satisfaction. He stopped now and then and gazed at the sun playing on the mountain peaks far away.

Then a range of hitherto dark blue peaks took fire in violet blushing tints, until they seemed an entire glowing flame. And now the snow-fields became rose-red in the east--wonderful fairy tales in towers and castles gleamed there--the three snowy peaks then were turned to blood, with a burning, shining flash on top of the middle one. And again in the distance, still unlighted, blue peaks, snow-drifts, and glens, on which the shadows were playing.

Jörgen was lying, with his father's spy-glass, watching the reindeer on the ice-fields.

"Good-by, Miss Inger-Johanna," said Grip. "I am going over the mountains to-night, with one of the men to guide me. There are more people here than the hut will accommodate. But first let me say to you," he added in a subdued tone, "that this open-hearted day on the high mountain has been one of the few of my life.... I have not found it necessary to say a single cowardly, bad witticism--nor to despise myself," he added roughly. "Yes, just so--just as you stand there, so fine and erect and haughty, under the great straw hat, I shall remember you till we meet in the city again."

"It is a good ten miles to Svartdalsbod," suggested the captain, when he took leave--"always welcome to Gilje, Grip."

He was already giving his farewell greetings a good distance up the steep ascent of Torsknut.

"Does not seem to know fatigue, that fellow," said the captain.

She stood looking at him. The last rays of the sun cast a pale yellow tinge in the evening with this transparent mirroring. There was such a warm life in her face!

Some kind of an insect--a humble-bee or a wasp--buzzed through the open window into the room newly tinted in blue--hummed so noisily on the window-pane that the young girl with the luxuriant black hair and the slightly dark, clear-cut face, who was lying sleeping into the morning, was almost aroused.

She lay sound asleep on her side, after having come home in the night. The impressions of the mountains' summits were still playing in her brain. She had another trout on the line--it flashed and floundered there in the lake--Grip came up with two sticks, which were to be placed crossways.

Surr-humm! straight into her face, so that she woke up.

The day was already far advanced.

There on the toilet table with white hangings above it surrounding the glass which had been put there for her return home, was the violet soap in silver paper.

It was plainly that which attracted all the inexperienced insects to ruin: they had found the way to an entirely new world of flowers there and plunged blindly headlong, believing in the discovery, without any conception of the numerous artificial products of the age outside of the mountain region--that the fragrance of violets did not produce violets, but only horrid, horrid pains in the stomach. There plainly existed an entire confusion in their ideas, to judge by all the disquiet and humming in and out of those that had recently come and possibly began to suspect something wrong and took a turn or two up and down in the room first, before the temptation became too great for them, and by the earlier arrivals that slowly crept up and down on the wall with acquired experience in life, or were lying stupefied and floundering on the window-sill.

"Ish!--and straight up into the washing water."

She looked with a certain indignation at the cause--her violet soap.

At the same time it opened a new train of thought while she smelled it two or three times.

"Mother's yellow soap is more honest."

She quickly threw it out of the window, and with a towel carefully wiped those that had fallen on the field of battle off the sill.

Later in the forenoon, Ma and Inger-Johanna stood down in the garden, picking sugar peas for dinner.

"Only the ripest, Inger-Johanna, which are becoming too hard and woody, till your father comes home. What will your aunt say when she hears that we have let you go with your father so far up in the wilderness--she certainly will not think such a trip very inviting, or comprehend that you can be so eloquent over stone and rocks."

"No, she thinks that nothing can compete with their Tulleröd," said Inger-Johanna, smiling.

"Pass the plate over to me, so that I may empty it into the basket," came from Ma.

"So aunt writes that Rönnow is going to stay all winter in Paris."

"Rönnow, yes--but I shall amuse myself very well by reading aloud to her this winter _Gedecke's Travels in Switzerland_,--and then give her small doses of my trip."

"Now you are talking without thinking, Inger-Johanna. There is always a great difference between that which is within the circle of culture and desolate wild tracts up here in the mountain region."

Ma's bonnet-covered head bowed down behind the pea-vines.

"Father says that it is surely because they want to use him at Stockholm that he is going to perfect himself in French."

"Yes, he is certainly going to become something great. You can believe we find it ever so snug and pleasant when we are sometimes at home alone and I read aloud to aunt."

Ma's large bonnet, spotted with blue, rose up, and with a table knife in her hand she passed the empty plate back. "And he has the bearing which suits, the higher he gets."

"Quite perfect--but I don't know how it is, one does not care to think about him up here in the country."

Ma stood a moment with the table knife in her hand.

"That will do," she said, as she took up the basket, somewhat troubled--"We shan't have many peas this year," she added, sighing.

_Chapter VII_

The kitchen at Gilje was completely given over to Christmas preparations.

There was a cold draught from the porch, an odor in the air of mace, ginger, and cloves--a roar of chopping-knives, and dull rumbling and beating so that the floor shook from the wooden mortar, where Great-Ola himself was stationed with a white apron and a napkin around his head.

At the head of the long kitchen table Ma was sitting, with a darning-needle and linen thread, sewing collared beef, while some of the crofter women and Thea, white as angels, were scraping meat for the fine meat-balls.

There, on the kitchen bench, with bloody, murderous arms, sat Thinka, who had recently returned home, stuffing sausages over a large trough. It went with great skill through the filler, and she fastened up the ends with wooden skewers, and struggled with one dark, disagreeable, gigantic leech after another, while their brothers or sisters were boiling in the mighty kettle, around which the flames crackled and floated off in the open fireplace.

The captain had come into the kitchen, and stood surveying the field of battle with a sort of pleasure. There were many kinds of agreeable prospects here for the thoughts to dwell upon, and samples of the finished products were continually being sent up to the office for him to give his opinion on.

"I'll show you how you should chop, girls," he said sportively, and took the knives from Torbjörg.

The two chopping-knives in his hands went up and down in the chopping-tray so furiously that they could hardly be distinguished, and awakened unmistakable admiration in the whole kitchen, while all paused in bewilderment at the masterpiece.

It is true, it continued for only two or three minutes, while Torbjörg and Aslak must stand with linen towels on their heads and chop all day.

But victory is still victory, and when the captain afterwards went into the sitting-room, humming contentedly, it was not without a little amused recollection of his strategy,--for, "yes, upon my soul," he could feel that his arms ached afterwards, nevertheless. And he rubbed them two or three times before he tied a napkin around his neck and seated himself at the table in order to do justice to the warm blood-pudding, with raisins and butter on it, which Thinka brought in to him.

"A little mustard, Thinka."

Thinka's quiet figure glided to the corner cupboard after the desired article.

"The plate might have been warmer for this kind of thing--it really ought to be almost burning hot for the raisins and butter."

The always handy Thinka was out by the chimney in a moment with a plate. She came in again with it in a napkin; it could not be held in any other way.

"Just pour it all over on to this plate, father, and then you will see."

One of the happy domestic traits which Thinka had disclosed since her return home was a wonderful knack of managing her father; there was hardly any trace of peevishness any longer.

Thinka's quiet, agreeable pliancy and cool, even poise spread comfort in the house. The captain knew that he only needed to put her on the track of some good idea or other in the way of food, and something always came of it. She was so handy, while, when Ma yielded, it was always done so clumsily and with difficulty, just as if she creaked on being moved, so to speak, that he became fretful, and began to dispute in spite of it, notwithstanding she knew very well he could not bear it.

A very great deal had been done since Monday morning, and to-morrow evening it was to be hoped they would be ready. Two cows, a heifer, and a hog, that was no little slaughtering--besides the sheep carcasses.

"The sheriff--the sheriff's horse is in the yard," was suddenly reported in the twilight into the bustle of the kitchen.

The sheriff! It was lightning that struck.

"Hurry up to the office and get your father down to receive him, Jörgen," said Ma, composing herself. "You will have to take off the towels and then stop pounding, Great-Ola, exasperating as it is."

"They smell it when the pudding smokes in the kettle, I think," exclaimed Marit, in her lively mountain dialect. "Isn't it the second year he has come here just at the time of the Christmas slaughtering? So they are rid of the menfolk lying in the way at home among themselves."

"Your tongue wags, Marit," said Ma, reprovingly. "The sheriff certainly does not find it any too pleasant at home since he lost his wife, poor man."

But it was dreadfully unfortunate that he came just now--excessively unfortunate. She must keep her ground; it wouldn't do to stop things out here now. The captain came hastily out into the kitchen. "The sheriff will stay here till to-morrow--it can't be helped, Ma. I will take care of him, if we only get a little something to eat."

"Yes, that is easy to say, Jäger--just as all of us have our hands full."

"Some minced meat--fried meat-balls--a little blood-pudding. That is easy enough. I told him that he would have slaughter-time fare--and then, Thinka," he nodded to her, "a little toddy as soon as possible."

Thinka had already started; she only stopped a moment at her bureau upstairs.

She was naturally so unassuming, and was not accustomed to feel embarrassed. Therefore she brought in the toddy tray like the wind, stopping only to put a clean blue apron on; and, after having spoken to the sheriff, went to the cupboard after rum and arrack, and to the tobacco table after some lighters, which she put down by the tray for the gentlemen before she vanished out through the kitchen door again.

"You must wash your hands, Torbjörg, and put things to rights in the guest-chamber; and then we must send a messenger for Anne Vaelta to help us, little as she is fit for. Jörgen, hurry!" came from Ma, who saw herself more and more deprived of her most needed forces.

Great-Ola had put up the sheriff's horse, and now stood pounding again at the mortar in his white surplice--thump, thump, thump, thump.

"Are you out of your senses out here? Don't you think?" said the captain, bouncing in; he spoke in a low voice, but for that reason the more passionately. "Aren't you going to mangle, too? Then the sheriff would get a thundering with a vengeance, both over his head and under his feet. It shakes the floor."

A look of despair came over Ma's face; in the sudden, dark, wild glance of her eye there almost shone rebellion--now he was beginning to drive her too far--But it ended in a resigned, "You can take the mortar with you out on the stone floor of the porch, Great-Ola."

And Thinka had to attend to the work of putting things in order and carrying in the supper, so that it was only necessary for Ma to sit there a little while, as they were eating, though she was on pins and needles, it is true; but she must act as if there was nothing the matter.

When Ma came in, there was a little formal talk in the beginning between her and the sheriff about the heavy loss he had suffered. She had not met him since he lost his wife, three months ago. It was lonesome for him now that he had only his sister, Miss Gülcke, with him. Both Viggo and Baldrian, which was a short name for Baltazar, were at the Latin school, and would not come home again till next year, when Viggo would enter the university.

The sheriff winked a little, and made a mournful gesture as if he wanted to convey an idea of sadly wiping one eyelash, but no more. He had given an exhibition of grief within nearly every threshold in the district by this time, and here he was in the house of people of too much common sense not to excuse him from any more protracted outburst just before a spread table with hot plates.

It developed into a rather long session at the table--with ever stronger compliments, as often as there was opportunity during the meal-time to catch a glimpse of the hostess, for every new dish that Thinka brought in smoking deliciously straight from the pan--actually a slaughtering feast--with a fine bottle of old ale in addition--for the new Christmas brew was too fresh as yet--and two or three good drams brought in just at the right time.

The sheriff also understood very well what was going on in the house, and how the hostess and Thinka were managing it.

The grown-up daughter cleared off the table and took care of everything so handily and comfortably without any bother and fuss--and so considerately. They had their pipes and a glass of toddy by their side again there on the sofa, with a fresh steaming pitcher, before they were aware of it.

The small inquisitive eyes of Sheriff Gülcke stood far apart; they looked into two corners at once, while his round, bald head shone on the one he talked to. He sat looking at the blond, rather slender young lady, with the delicate, light complexion, who busied herself so silently and gracefully.

"You are a fortunate man, you are, Captain," he said, speaking into the air.

"Have a little taste, Sheriff," said the captain consolingly, and they touched glasses.

"Nay, you who have a house full of comfort can talk--cushions about you in every corner--so you can export to the city--But I, you see,"--his eyes became moist--"sit there in my office over the records. I was very much coddled, you know--oh, well, don't let us talk about it. I must have my punishment for one thing and another, I suppose, as well as others.

"Isn't it true, Miss Kathinka," he asked when she came in, "it is a bad sheriff who wholly unbidden falls straight down upon you in slaughtering-time? But you must lend him a little home comfort, since it is all over with such things at his own home.

"Bless me, I had almost forgotten it," he exclaimed eagerly, and hastened, with his pipe in his mouth, to his document case, which hung on a chair near the door. "I have the second volume of _The Last of the Mohicans_ for you from Bine Scharfenberg, and was to get--nay, what was it? It is on a memorandum--_A Capricious Woman_, by Emilie Carlén."

He took it out eagerly and handed it over to her, not without a certain gallantry.

"Now you must not forget to give it to me to-morrow morning, Miss Kathinka," he said threateningly, "or else you will make me very unhappy down at Bine Scharfenberg's. It won't do to offend her, you know."

Even while the sheriff was speaking, Thinka's eye glided eagerly over the first lines--only to make sure about the continuation--and in a twinkling she was down again from her room with the read-through book by Carlén and the first volume of the Mohicans done up in paper and tied with a bit of thread.

"You are as prompt as a man of business, Miss Thinka," he said jokingly, as with a sort of slow carefulness he put the package into his case; his two small eyes shone tenderly upon her.

Notwithstanding there had been slaughtering and hubbub ever since early in the morning, Thinka must still, after she had gone to bed, allow herself to peep a little in the entertaining book.

It was one chapter, and one more, and still one more, with ever weakening determination to end with the next.

Still at two o'clock in the morning she lay with her candlestick behind her on the pillow, and steadily read _The Last of the Mohicans_, with all the vicissitudes of the pursuits and dangers of the noble Uncas.

Ma wondered, it is true, that so many of the slender tallow candles were needed this winter.

The sheriff must have a little warm breakfast before going away in the morning.

And now he took leave, and thanked them for the hours that had been so agreeable and cheering, although he came so inconveniently--oh, madame, he knew he came at an inconvenient time. "Although now you have certainly got a right hand in household matters. Yes, Miss Thinka, I have tested you; one does not have the eye of a policeman for nothing.

"Invisible, and yet always at hand, like a quiet spirit in the house--is not that the best that can be said of a woman?" he asked, complimenting her fervently, when he had got his scarf around his fur coat, and went down to the sleigh with beaming eyes and a little grayish stubble of beard--for he had not shaved himself to-day.

"Pleasant man, the sheriff. His heart is in the right place," said the captain when, enlivened and rubbing his hands from the cold, he came in again into the sitting-room.

But father became ill after all the rich food at the slaughtering-time.

The army doctor advised him to drink water and exercise a good deal; a toddy spree now and then would not do him any harm.

And it did not improve the rush of blood to his head that Christmas came so soon after.

Father was depressed, but was reluctant to be bled, except the customary twice a year, in the spring and autumn.

After the little party for Buchholtz, the judge's chief clerk, on Thursday, he was much worse. He went about unhappy, and saw loss and neglect and erroneous reckonings in all quarters.

There was no help for it, a messenger must go now after the parish clerk, Öjseth.

Besides his clerical duties, he taught the youth, vaccinated, and let blood.

What he was good for in the first named direction shall be left unsaid; but in the last it could safely be said that he had very much, nay, barrels, of the blood of the district on his conscience, and not least that of the full-blooded captain, whom he had bled regularly now for a series of years.

The effect was magnificent. After the sultry and oppressive stormy and pessimistic mood, which filled, so to speak, every groove in the house and oppressed all faces, even down to Pasop--a brilliant fair weather, jokes with Thinka, and wild plans that the family should go down in the summer and see the manoeuvres.

It was at the point of complete good humor that Ma resolutely seized the opportunity to speak about Jörgen's going to school--all that Aunt Alette had offered of board and lodging, and what she thought could be managed otherwise.

There was a reckoning and studying, with demonstration and counter-demonstration, down to the finest details of the cost of existence in the city.

The captain represented the items of expenditure and the debit side in the form of indignant questions and conjectures for every single one, as to whether she wanted to ruin him, and Ma stubbornly and persistently defended the credit side, while she went over and went over again all the items to be deducted.

When, time after time, things whirled round and round in the continual repetition, so that she got confused, there were bad hours before she succeeded in righting herself in the storm.

The captain must be accustomed to it slowly, until it penetrated so far into him that he began to see and think. But, like a persistent, untiring cruiser, she always had the goal before her eyes and drew near to it imperceptibly.

"This ready money"--it was for Ma to touch a sore, which nevertheless must be opened. The result was that the captain allowed himself to be convinced, and now became himself the most zealous for the plan.

Jörgen was examined in all directions. He was obliged to sit in the office, and the captain subjected him to the cramming process.

* * * * *

"That's as old as the hills," read the captain. "If you swing a hen round and put her down backwards with a chalk mark in front of her beak, she will lie perfectly still; will not dare to move. She certainly believes it is a string that holds her. I have tried it ever so many times--that you may safely tell her, Thinka."

"But why does Inger-Johanna write that?" asked Ma, rather seriously.

"Oh, oh,--for nothing--only so--"

Thinka had yesterday received her own letter, enclosed in that to her parents; it was a letter in regard to Ma's approaching birthday, which was under discussion between the sisters. And Inger-Johanna had given her a lecture in it, something almost inciting her to rebellion and to stick to her flame there in the west, if there really was any fire in it. That about the hen and the chalk mark was something at second-hand from Grip. Women could be made to believe everything possible, and gladly suffered death when they got such a chalk mark before their beaks!

That might be true enough, Thinka thought. But now, when all were so against it, and she saw how it would distress her father and mother, then--she sighed and had a lump in her throat--the chalk mark was really thicker than she could manage, nevertheless.

Inger-Johanna's letter had made her very heavy hearted. She felt so unhappy that she could have cried, if any one only looked at her; and as Ma did that several times during the day, she probably went about a little red-eyed.

At night she read _Arwed Gyllenstjerna_, by Van der Velde, so that the bitter tears flowed.

Her sister's letter also contained something on her own account, which was not meant for her father and mother.

For you see, Thinka, when you have gone through balls here as I have, you do not any longer skip about blindly with all the lights in your eyes. You know a little by yourself; one way or another, there ought to be something in the manner of the person. Oh, this ball chat! I say, as Grip does: I am tired, tired, tired of it. Aunt isn't any longer so eager that I shall be there, though many times more eager than I.

There I am now looked upon as haughty and critical and whatever else it is, only because I will not continually find something to talk away about! Aunt now thinks that I have got a certain coldness of my own in my "too lively nature," a reserved calm, which is imposing and piquant--that is what she wants, I suppose! In all probability just like the ice in the steaming hot pudding among the Chinese, which we read about, you remember, in the _Bee_.

Aunt has so many whims this winter. Now we two must talk nothing but French together! But that she should write to Captain Rönnow that I was so perfect in it, I did not like at all; I have no desire to figure as a school-girl before him when he returns; neither is my pronunciation so "sweet," as she says!

I really don't understand her any longer. If there was any one who could and ought to defend Grip at this time, it should be she; but instead of that, she attacks him whenever she can.

He has begun to keep a free Sunday-school or lecture for those who choose to come, in a hall out on Storgaden. It is something, you know, which creates a sensation. And aunt shrugs her shoulders, and looks forward to the time when he will vanish out of good society, although she has always been the first to interest herself in him and to say that he came with something new. It is extremely mean of her, I think.

_Chapter VIII_

Jörgen must start on his journey before the sleighing disappeared, for the bad roads when the frost was coming out might last till St. John's Day, and to harness the horses in such going would be stark madness. If he were not to lose a whole year, he must go early and be prepared privately for admission to school.

Jörgen was lost in meditations and thoughts about all that from which he was about to be separated. The gun, the sleds, the skis, the turning-lathe, the tools, the wind-mill, and the corn-mill left behind there on the hills, all must be devised with discretion--naturally to Thea first and foremost, on condition that she should take care of them till he came home again.

If he had been asked what he would rather be, he would doubtless have answered "turner," "miller," or "smith;" the last thing in the world which would have presented itself to his range of ideas, to say nothing of coming up as a bent or a longing, would have been the lifting up to the loftier regions of books. But Greece and Latium were lying like an unalterable fate across his path, so that there was nothing to do or even to think about.

On the day of his departure, the pockets of his new clothes, which were made out of the captain's old ones, were a complete depository for secret despatches.

First, a long letter of fourteen pages, written in the night, blotted with tears, from Thinka to Inger-Johanna, in which with full details she gave the origin, continuation, and hopeless development of her love for Aas. She had three keepsakes from him--a little breastpin, the cologne bottle which he had given her on the Christmas tree, and then his letter to her with a lock of his hair on the morning he had to leave the office. And even if she could not now act against the wishes of her parents, but would rather make herself unhappy, still she had promised herself faithfully never to forget him, to think of him till the last hour.

The second despatch was from Ma to Aunt Alette, and contained--besides some economical propositions--a little suggestion about sounding Inger-Johanna when Captain Rönnow returned from Paris. Ma could not quite understand her this last time.

The captain had never imagined that there would be such a vacuum after Jörgen was gone. In his way he had been the occasion of so much mental excitement, so many exertions and anxieties, and so much heightened furious circulation of blood, that now he was away the captain had lost quite a stimulating influence. He had now no longer any one to look after and supervise with eyes in the back of his head, to exercise his acuteness on, or take by surprise--only the quiet, unassailable Thea to keep school with.

The doctor prescribed a blood-purifying dandelion tonic for him.

And now when the spring came--dazzling light, gleaming water everywhere, with melting patches of snow and its vanguards of red stone broken on the steep mountain sides--Thinka, with a case-knife in her numb hands, was out in the meadow gathering dandelion roots. They were small, young, and still tender, but they were becoming stronger day by day.

The captain, with military punctuality, at seven o'clock every morning emptied the cup prepared for him and stormed out.

To-day a fierce, boisterous, icy cold blast of rain with hail and snow met him at the outer door and blew far in on the floor. The sides of the mountains were white again.

These last mornings he was accustomed to run down over the newly broken-up potato field, which was being ploughed; but in this weather--

"We must give up the field work, Ola," he announced as his resolution in the yard--"it looks as if the nags would rather have to go out with the snow-plough."

He trudged away; it was not weather to stand still in. The rain drove and pounded in showers down over the windows in the sitting-room with great ponds of water, so that it must be continually mopped up and cloths placed on the window-seats.

Ma and Thinka stood there in the gray daylight over the fruit of their common work at the loom this winter--a roller with still unbleached linen, which they measured out into tablecloths and napkins.

The door opened wide, and the captain's stout form appeared, enveloped in a dripping overcoat.

"I met a stranger down here with something for you, Thinka--wrapped up in oil-cloth. Can you guess whom it is from?"

Thinka dropped the linen, and blushing red advanced a step towards him, but immediately shook her head.

"Rejerstad, that execution-horse, had it with him on his trip up. He was to leave it here." The captain stood inspecting the package. "The sheriff's seal--Bring me the scissors."

In his officiousness, he did not give himself time to take his coat off.

"A para-sol!--A beautiful--new--" Thinka burst out. She remained standing and gazing at it.

"See the old--Hanged if the sheriff isn't making up to you, Thinka."

"Don't you see that here is 'philopena' on the seal, Jäger?" Ma put in, to afford a cover.

"I won a philopena from him--on New Year's Day, when father and I took dinner at Pastor Horn's--after church. I had entirely forgotten it," she said in a husky tone. Her eyes glanced from the floor halfway up to her parents, as she quietly went out, leaving the parasol lying on the table.

"I guess you will use your linen for a wedding outfit, Ma," said the captain, slapping his hands and swinging his hat with a flourish. "What would you say to the sheriff for a son-in-law here at Gilje?"

"You saw that Thinka went out, Jäger." Ma's voice trembled a little. "Very likely she is thinking that it is not long since his wife was laid in the grave. Thinka is very good, and would like to submit to us; but there may be limits to what we can ask." There was something precipitate in her movements over the linen, which indicated internal disturbance.

"The sheriff, Ma; is not he a catch? Fine, handsome man in his best years. Faith, I don't know what you women will have. And, Gitta," he reminded her, a little moved, "it is just the men who have lived most happily in their first marriage who marry again the soonest."

Time flew with tearing haste towards St. John's Day. Spring was brewing in the air and over the lakes. The meadow stood moist and damp, hillock on hillock, like the luxuriant forelocks of horses. The swollen brooks sighed and roared with freshly shining banks. They boiled over, as it were, with the power of the same generating life and sap that made the buds burst in alder, willow, and birch almost audibly, and shows its nature in the bouncing, vigorous movements of the mountain boy, in his rapid speech, his lively, shining eyes, and his elastic walk.

At the beginning of summer a letter came from Inger-Johanna, the contents of which set the captain's thoughts into a new flight:

_June 14, 1843_

DEAR PARENTS,--At last a little breath to write to you. Captain Rönnow went away yesterday, and I have as yet hardly recovered my balance from the two or three weeks of uninterrupted sociability while he was here.

It will be pleasant to get out to Tilderöd next week on top of all this. It is beginning to be hot and oppressive here in the city.

There did not pass a day that we were not at a party, either at dinner or in the evening; but the pearl of them was aunt's own little dinners, which she has a reputation for, and at which we spoke only French. The conversation ran on so easily, one expresses one's self so differently, and our thoughts capture each other's already half guessed. Rönnow certainly speaks French brilliantly.

A man who carries himself as he does makes a certain noble, masterly impression; you are transported into an atmosphere of chivalric manly dignity, and hear the spurs jingle, I had almost said musically; you almost forget that there are those who stamp their feet.

When I compare the awkward compliments at balls, which may come smack in your face, with Captain Rönnow's manner of saying and not saying and yet getting a thing in, then I do not deny that I get the feeling of a kind of exhilarating pleasure. He claimed that he had such an illusion from sitting opposite me at the table. I resembled so much a portrait of a historic lady which he had seen at the Louvre; naturally she had black hair and carried her neck haughtily and looked before her, smiling, with an expression which might have been characterized, "I wait--and reject--till he comes, who can put me in my right place."

Well, if it amuses him to think of such things, then I am happy to receive the compliments. It is true there are such godfathers and uncles who are utterly infatuated with their goddaughters, and spoil them with nonsense and sweets. I am afraid that Rönnow is a little inclined to this so far as I am concerned, for, sensible and straightforward as he always is, he continually launches out into superlatives in relation to me; and I really cannot help thinking that it is both flattering and pleasant when he is continually saying that I am made for presiding where ladies and gentlemen of the higher circles are received. He really must think more of me than I deserve, because he sees that I am perhaps a little more open and direct than others, and have no natural gift at concealing what I mean, when I am in society.

Yes, yes, that is the thanks you get because you have continually spoiled me; in any case, I do not immediately creep under a chair, but try to sit where I am sitting as long as possible.

But, now, why hasn't such a man married? If he had been younger, and I just a little vainer, he might almost have been dangerous. He still has fine black hair--a little thin, and perhaps he takes a little too much pains with it. There is one thing I cannot understand, and that is why people try to conceal their age.

The captain gave a poke at his wig: "When one goes a-courting, Ma," he said, smiling.

Two mail days later he came home from the post-office with a long letter from Aunt Alette to Ma. She was not a favorite of his. In the first place she was too "well read and cultured;" in the second place she was "sweet;" lastly, she was an old maid.

He seated himself in an armchair, with his arms folded before him, to have it read to him. He plainly regarded it as a bitter document.

MY DEAR GITTA,--It is no easy task, but really a rather complicated and difficult one, you have laid upon the shoulders of an old maid, even if she is your never failing, faithful Aunt Alette. If we could only have talked together, you would have soon guessed my meaning; but now there is no other way for me to free my conscience than to write and write, till it has all come out that I have on my mind.

Now you know well enough that the governor's wife is not in my line, and if it had not been for what you wrote me when you sent Inger-Johanna here, I certainly should not have moved my old limbs so far out of the old town where I have my circle of firm friends, and gone in to make formal calls at the governor's, notwithstanding she is always excessively friendly and means it, too, I dare say.

First and foremost, I must tell you that Inger-Johanna is a lady in every respect, but still with more substance to her, if I may express myself so, and stronger will than our poor Eleonore. It is certain that she in many ways overawes, not to say domineers over, your sister-in-law, strict and domineering as she otherwise has the reputation of being. And, therefore, she must resort to underhand means in many things, when she finds that it won't do to play the game openly before Inger-Johanna, which, according to my best convictions, has been the case with regard to the captain. He certainly came here this time from his trip to Paris with the full intent of completing his courting, after, like a wise and prudent general, having first surveyed the ground with his own eyes. Simply the manner in which he always addressed and paid his respects to her would have convinced a blind person of that.

The only one, however, who does not understand it, notwithstanding she is besieged in a thousand ways, is the object of his attentions herself. She sits there in the midst of the incense, truly protected against the shrewdness of the whole world by her natural innocence, which is doubly surprising, and, old Aunt Alette says, to be admired in her who is so remarkably clever.

I will not, indeed, absolve her from being a little giddy at all the incense which he and your sister-in-law incessantly burn before her (and what elderly, experienced person would not tolerate and forgive this in a young girl!) But the giddiness does not tend to the desired result, namely, the falling in love, but only makes her a little puffed up in her feeling of being a perfect lady, and is limited to her doing homage to him as the knightly cavalier and--her father's highly honored friend.

It is this, which he, so to speak, is for the present beaten back by, so he is going abroad again, and this evidently after consultation with your sister-in-law. Inger-Johanna, if my old eyes do not deceive me,--and something we two have seen and experienced, both separately and together, in this world, dear Gitta,--is not found ready for the matrimonial question, inasmuch as her vanity and pride have hitherto appeared as a feeling entirely isolated from this.

There was a snore from the leather-covered chair, and Ma continued, more softly:

She may, indeed, and that tolerably earnestly, wish to rule over a fine salon; but she has not yet been brought clearly to comprehend that with it she must take the man who owns it. There is something in her open nature which always keeps the distance between these two questions too wide for even a captain of cavalry to leap over it. God bless her!

Love is like an awakening, without which we neither know nor understand anything of its holy language; and unhappy are they who learn to know it too late, when they have imprisoned themselves in the so-called bonds of duty. I am almost absolutely sure that love has not yet been awakened in Inger-Johanna--may a good angel protect her!

"Ouf!--such old maids," said the captain, waking up. "Go on, go on--is there any more?"

How far the young student who has a position in the office is in any degree a hindrance to these plans, I don't dare to say, either pro or con. But the governor's wife thinks or fears something, I am firmly convinced from her whole manner of treating him lately, although she is far too bright to let Inger-Johanna get even the slightest suspicion of her real reason.

I heard it plainly when I took coffee there on Sunday, before they went away to Tilderöd, and she had the maid tell him that she could not see him. There was a not very gracious allusion to his "Sunday professorship of pettifogging ideas," as she called it.

I suppose these must be something of the same sort of ideas that I was enthusiastic about when I was young and read Rousseau's _Émile_, which absorbed me very much, nay, which can yet occupy some of my thoughts. For she stated, as one of his leading ideas, that he, in his headlong blindness, thought that he could simplify the world, and first and foremost education, to a very few natural propositions or so-called principles. And you know, we--still, that is going to be quite too long. To be brief, when Inger-Johanna with impetuosity rushed to the defence of Grip, she saw in him only the son of the idiotic "cadet at Lurleiken," as he is called, one of the well-known, amusing figures of the country; but this one, in addition to his father's distracted ideas, was also equipped with a faculty of using that fearful weapon, satire--_voilà_ the phantom Grip!

Youthful student ideas could perhaps be used gracefully enough as piquant topics of conversation; but instead of that, to set them in motion in a headlong and sensational manner, without regard to the opinion of older people, was a great step, was pretentious, and showed something immature, something raw, which by no means ought to be relished.

I have reported this so much at length in order to show you by the very expressions that there may be here a "good deal of cotton in the linen," as the saying is.

And since I am going to bring my innermost heart to light, I shall have to tell you that he appears to me to be a trustworthy, truthful young man, whose natural disposition is as he speaks and not otherwise, and he carries a beautiful stamp on his countenance and in his whole bearing. If possibly he is a little forgetful of "My son, if you want to get on in the world, then bow," that is worst for him and not to his dishonor, we know.

It was also a truly refreshing enjoyment for me, as if looking into the kingdom of youth, awakening many thoughts, to talk with him, the two evenings this winter when he accompanied me, an old woman, home from the governor's (for him, I have no doubt, a very small pleasure), all the way out to the old town, when otherwise I should have been obliged to go anxiously with my servant-girl and a lantern.

"Bah! nobody will attack her," growled the captain, bored.

_Chapter IX_

The captain had had a genuine drive in the service ever since summer, when he and the lieutenant inspected the storehouse for the tents, together with the arsenal and the guns in the levying districts. Then the military exercises, and finally now the meeting of the commissioners of conscription. There had been tolerably lively goings-on at the inn in the principal parish the last two or three evenings with the army doctor, the solicitor Sebelow, tall Buchholtz, Dorff the sheriff's officer, and the lieutenants.

But the result was splendid in so far that, instead of the bay horse, he was now driving home with a fine three or four-year-old before the cariole, with a white star on the forehead and white stockings that almost promised to be a match for Svarten if--if--it were not a bolter.

It had just now, when the old beggar woman rose up from the ditch by the wayside, shown something in the eyes and ears which it certainly had concealed during all the three days of the session. He had at last even shot over its head to test it, without so much as the horse giving a start.

It would be too mean, after the doctor and First Lieutenant Dunsack had been unanimous in the same opinion as he about the beast, and he, besides, had given the horse-dealer twenty-five dollars to boot.

But now it trotted off with the cariole very steadily and finely. The little inclination to break into a canter was only unmannerliness and a little of coltish bad habits which stuck to it still, and would disappear by driving.

Great-Ola had not had a steadier horse in the stall by the side of Svarten, nevertheless--"You shall grow old in my barn; do you understand, you young Svarten? shall go to the city in pairs with your uncle--before the carriage for Inger--There now, you beast--of a--dog"--swip--swish--swip--swish--"I shall teach you to drop your bad habits, I shall. Whoa!" he thundered. "There! there!"

There was a whole train of gay fellows who were standing, talking, shouting, and drinking in the road outside the gate to the Bergset farm.

At the sight of the captain's well-known form they made way for him, greeting him politely. They knew that he had been far away, and the men who had gone to the mustering had just returned to the farms round about, yesterday and to-day.

"Fine, isn't he, Halvor Hejen? a lively colt--still, rather young."

"Maybe, captain. Fine, if he isn't skittish," replied the one spoken to.

"What is going on here--auction after Ole Bergset?"

"Yes; Bardon, the bailiff, is busy with the hammer in the room in there."

"So, so, Solfest Staale!" he said, winking to a young man, "do you believe there is anything in the story that Lars Överstadsbraekken is courting the widow here? Their lands lie very fine."

There came an ill-concealed amusement on the countenances of those standing about. They guessed what the captain was at. It was the rival he was speaking to.

"There is not any cow for sale that is going to calve in the fall, I suppose?"

There might be, they thought.

"Hold my horse a little while, Halvor, while I go and talk a little with the bailiff about it."

There was a crowd of people in the house and the captain was greeted by one knot after another of noisy talking folk, men and women, girls and boys, among whom the brandy bottle was diligently circulating, until he got into the room where the sale was going on.

There sat Bardon in the crowded, steaming room, calling over and over again, with his well-known, strong, husky voice, threatening with the hammer, giving utterance to a joke, finally threatening for the last, last time, until with the law's blows he nailed the bid firmly forever down on the top of the table. They made way for the captain as he came.

"Are you also so crazy as to allow your wife to go to the auction, Martin Kvale?" he said, joking, to an important fellow with silver buttons on his coat, as he passed by.

Out in the hall stood the handsome Guro Granlien with a crowd of other young girls.

"Oh, Guro!" he said, chucking her under the chin, "now Bersvend Vaage has come home from the drill. He was in a brown study and wholly lost his wits, the fellow, and so I came near putting him in arrest: you are too hard on him, Guro." He nodded to the snickering girls.

Guro looked with great, staring eyes at the captain. How could he know that?

The captain knew the district in and out, forwards and backwards, as he expressed it. He had an inconceivably keen scent for contemplated farm trades, weddings, betrothals, and anything of the kind that concerned the young conscripts. Guro Granlien was not the first girl who opened her eyes wide on that account. He got a great deal out of his five subalterns, but by no means the least was to be found in his own always alert interest in these things.

And when, to-day, he made the little turn up to the place of auction, the reason was far less the "autumn cow," than his lively curiosity for the new things that might have happened during his long absence.

Therefore it was not at all unwelcome to him when the widow came out and invited him into the "other room," where he must at least have a drop of ale before he left the farm.

He was curious to get her on the confessional as to the possibility of a new marriage, and also had the satisfaction, after a half hour's confidential chat, of having won from her confidence the whole of the real and true condition of her thoughts about herself and the farm.

No one cheated him any longer about that affair,--the widow of Bergset was to retain undivided possession of the estate of the deceased and--not marry. But she was anxious not to let it come out; she wanted to be courted, of course--as a good match in the district, naturally.

The captain understood it very well: it was sly.

Something must also be said about something else at last, and so Randi, in the spirit of what had been said, added: "And the sheriff, who is going to marry again."

"So?"

"They say he is a constant visitor at the house of Scharfenberg, the solicitor. Very likely it is the youngest daughter, eh?"

"Don't know. Good-by, Randi."

He went quickly, so that his spurs rattled, and his sabre flapped under his coat, down to his horse without looking to the right or left or speaking to any one. He pressed his shako more firmly down on his forehead before he got into the cariole.

"Thanks, Halvor. Give me the reins. There you--"

He gave young Svarten, who began with some capers, a taste of the whip, and off he went with tight reins at full trot, so that the fence-posts flew like drumsticks past his eyes.

In the quiet, hazy autumn day the cattle here and there were out on the highway.

A pig provoked him by obstinately running before the cariole.

"There, take care to get your stumps out of the way!"

It ended with a little cut on its back.

"See there! there is a beast of a cow lying in the middle of the road," he broke out, with his lips firmly pressed together.

"Well, if you won't get up, then you are welcome to stay! If you please--I am stupid also--I'll drive on."

His bitterness took full possession of him, and he would have firmly allowed the wheel to go over the animal's back if the latter had not risen up quickly at the last moment, so near that the captain's cariole was half raised up, while it grazed and was within an ace of being upset.

"Hm, hm," he mumbled, somewhat brought to his senses as he looked back upon the object of his missed revenge.

"So, so--off, I say, you black knacker--if you once peep back again in that way, I will kill you! Ha, ha, ha! If you run, you will still find a hill, my good friend."

He had had a tremendous headache all day; but it was not that which annoyed him--that he knew.

And when he came home, where they were expecting father to-day in great suspense after his long absence, his looks were dark.

"There, Ola! Curry the horse--dry him with a wisp of straw first--take good care of him--put a blanket on his back; do you hear? I only drove the fellow a little up the hill."

Great-Ola looked at the captain and nodded his head confidently, as he led the horse and carriage away from the steps; there was surely something the matter; the captain had got cheated again with this new nag.

"Good day, Ma--good day!" and he kissed her hastily. "Yes, I am quite well."

He took off his cloak and shako. "Oh, can't you let Marit take the trunk and the travelling-bag so that they needn't stand there on the steps any longer?--Oh, yes; it has been tiresome enough," as he evaded rather coldly Thinka's attentions. "Put the sabre on the peg, and carry the bag up to my chamber."

He himself went first up to the office to look at the mail, and then down to the stable to see how Great-Ola had treated Svarten.

There was something the matter with father; that was clear!

Ma's face, anxiously disturbed, followed him here and there in the doorways, and Thinka glided in and out without breaking the silence.

When he came in, the supper-table was spread--herring salad, decorated with red beets and slices of hard boiled eggs, and a glass of brandy by the side of it--and then half salted trout and a good bottle of beer.

Father was possibly not quite insensible, but extremely reticent. You could absolutely get only words of one syllable in answer to the most ingeniously conceived questions!

"The sheriff is going to marry again, they say; it is absolutely certain!" he let fall at last, as the first agreeable news he knew from the outer world; "Scharfenberg's youngest."

The remark was followed by deep silence, even if a gleam of perfect contentment glided over Thinka's face, and she busied herself with eating. They both felt that his ill-humor came from this.

"That man can say he is lucky with his daughters--Bine soon in a parsonage, and now Andrea the sheriff's wife! Perhaps you can get a position there, Thinka, when you need it some day, as governess for the children, or housekeeper; she won't be obliged to do more in the house than just what she pleases; she can afford it."

Thinka, blushing to the roots of her hair, kept her eyes on her plate.

"Yes, yes, Ma, as you make your bed you must lie in it in this world."

No more was said before Thinka cleared off the table, when Ma apologetically exclaimed, "Poor Thinka!"

The captain wheeled towards her on the floor with his fingers in the armholes of his vest and blinked indignantly at her.

"Do you know! After the parasol and the one attention after another which he has taken the pains to show all summer, if she could have given the man a bit of thanks and friendliness other than she has--It would not have gone so at all, if I had been at home!"--his voice rose to something like a peal of thunder--"But I think it is a flock of geese that I have here in the house, and not grown-up women who look out a little for themselves. Andrea Scharfenberg didn't let herself be asked twice, not she!" he said, walking out again when Thinka came in; he did not care if she did hear it.

Ma gazed somewhat thoughtfully at him, and in the days that followed, they petted and coddled father in every way to make him a little more cheerful. Thinka, in the midst of her quiet carefulness, cast her eyes down involuntarily, when he groaned and panted in this way.

He did not go out any farther than to look after young Svarten.

The horse had fever in one hoof to-day after the new shoeing. It was a nail which had been driven in too far by that blockhead of a smith. It must come out.

The captain stood silently looking on in his favorite position, with his arms on the lower half of the stable door, while Great-Ola, with the hind leg of young Svarten over his leg, was performing the operation of extraction with the tongs. The animal was good-natured and did not so much as move his leg.

"O-o-ola," came hoarsely, half smothered.

Great-Ola looked up.

"Good Lord!" if the captain did not sink slowly down, while he still held onto the stable door, right on the dung!

Ola looked a moment irresolutely at his master, dropping the horse's foot. Then he took the stable pail and spattered some water into his face until he once more manifested a little life and consciousness.

He then held the pail to his mouth.

"Drink, drink, Captain! Don't be afraid. It is only the result of all that drilling and pleasuring. It is just as it is when one has kept up a wedding festivity too long. My brother--"

"Help me out, Ola! There, let me lean on you--gently, gently. Ah, it does one good to breathe--breathe," as he stopped. "Now it's over, I believe. Yes, entirely over, nothing more than a half fainting spell. Just go with me a little bit, Ola, as a matter of precaution. Hm, hm, that goes well enough. Yes, yes, I have no doubt it is the irregular life the whole of the autumn. Go and call my wife. Say I am up in the chamber. I can manage the stairs bravely."

There was no little fright.

This time it was the captain who was at ease and turned it off, and Ma who without authority dispatched a messenger. If the army surgeon was not at home, then he must go to the district doctor.

When the army surgeon, Rist, came, and had received at the door Ma's anxious explanations that Jäger had had a slight shock, for the calming of the house he delivered a humorous lecture.

It was wholly a question of degree. The man who drank only so much that he stammered suffered from paralytic palsy of the tongue--and in this way every blessed man that he knew was a paralytic patient. This was only a congestion not uncommon among full-blooded people.

Jäger himself was in fact so far over it that he demanded the toddy tray in the evening--true enough, only an extremely light dose for his part! But cock and bull stories from the encampment and about Svarten were told in the clouds of smoke, and with constant renewals of the thin essence, till half-past one in the morning.

There was a roaring in the stove on one of the following forenoons, while the captain sat in his office chair, and wrote so that his quill-pen sputtered.

As usual at this time of the year, after his long absence, there was a great multitude of things to be disposed of. Thea's Norwegian grammar was lying on the green table by the door; she had just finished reading, and was heard humming outside in the hall.

There was a noise on the stairs, and Ma showing some one the way up, "That way--to the captain."

There was a knocking at the door.

"Good day, my man! Well?"

It was an express from the sheriff--in Sunday dress--with a letter. It was to be given to the captain himself.

"What? Is there to be an answer? Well, well! Yes, go down to the kitchen and get a little something to eat and a dram.--Hm, hm," he mumbled and threw the letter, written on letter-paper and fastened with a seal, down on his desk, while in the mean time he took a turn up and down the floor. "Notice of the betrothal, I suppose--or perhaps an invitation to the wedding."

Opening it, he read it, standing up--eagerly running it over hastily--a cursed long introduction!--Over that--over that--quite to the third page.

"Well, there it comes!"

He struck the back of the hand in which he held the letter with a resounding whack into the other, and then seated himself--"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!"

He snapped his fingers, once, twice, three times, in a brown study, scratched his head behind his ear, and then slyly up under his wig.

"Now, we shall see--we shall see!--And that nonsense about Scharfenberg." He rushed to the door and jerked it open; but bethought himself and walked on tiptoe to the stairs. "Who is there in the hall--you, Thea?"

The little square-built, brown-eyed Thea flew up the stairs.

"Tell Ma to come up," he said, nodding.

Thea looked up at her father: there was something out of the ordinary about him.

When Ma came in, he walked about with the letter behind his back, clearing his throat. There was the suitable deliberate seriousness about him which the situation demanded.

"I have got a letter, Ma--from the sheriff!--Read!--or shall I read?"

He stood leaning against the desk, and went through its three pages, period by period, with great moderation, till he came to the point, then he hurled it out so that it buzzed in the air, and hugged Ma wildly.

"Well, well!--what do you say, Ma? Take a trip when we want to go down to our son-in-law!" He rubbed his hands. "It was a real surprise, Ma,--hm, hm," he began, again clearing his throat. "It is best that we ask Thinka to come up and tell her the contents--don't you think?"

"Ye-es," said Ma huskily, having turned to the door; she could see no help or escape for her any more, poor girl!

The captain walked up and down in the office, waiting. He had the high-spirited, dignified, paternal expression which is completely absorbed in the importance of the moment.

But where was she gone to?

She could not be found. They had hunted for her over the whole house.

But the captain was not impatient to-day.

"Well, then, don't you see her?" he mildly asked two or three times through the door.

At last Thea found her in the garret. She had taken refuge up there and hid herself, when she saw the express and heard that it was from the sheriff, in anticipation of the contents. And now she was sitting with her head on her arms and her apron over her head.

She had not been crying; she had been seized with a sort of panic; she felt an irresistible impulse to hide herself away somewhere and shut her eyes, so that it would be really dark, and she would not be obliged to think.

She looked a little foolish when she went down with Thea to her father and mother in the office.

"Thinka," said the captain, when she came in, "we have received to-day from the sheriff an important letter for your future. I suppose it is superfluous to say--after all the attention you have allowed him to show you during the year--what it is about, and that your mother and I regard it as the greatest good fortune that could fall to your lot, and to ours also. Read the letter and consider it well. Sit down and read it, child."

Thinka read; but it did not seem as if she got far; she shook her head dumbly the whole time without knowing it.

"You understand very well, it is not any youthful love fancy, and any such exalted nonsense that he asks of you. It is if you will fill an honored position with him that you are asked, and if you can give the good will and care for him which he would naturally expect of a wife."

There was no answer to be got, except a weak groan down into her lap.

The captain's face began to grow solemn.

But Ma whispered, with a blaze of lightning in her eyes, "You see plainly, she cannot think, Jäger.--Don't you think as I do, father," she said aloud, "that it is best we let Thinka take the letter, so that she can consider it till to-morrow? It is such a surprise."

"Of course, if Thinka prefers it," came after them, from the captain, who was greatly offended, as Ma went with her, shutting her up in her chamber.

She had her cry out under the down quilt during the whole afternoon.

In the twilight Ma went up and sat beside her.

"No place to turn to, you see, when one will not be a poor, unprovided-for member of a family. Sew, sew your eyes out of your head, till at last you lie in a corner of some one's house. Such an honorable proposal would seem to many people to be a great thing."

"Aas! Aas, mother!" articulated Thinka very weakly.

"God knows, child, that if I saw any other way out, I would show it to you, even if I should have to hold my fingers in the fire in order to do it."

Thinka slipped her hand onto her mother's thin hand and sobbed gently into her pillow.

"Your father is no longer very strong--does not bear many mental excitements,--so that the outlook is dark enough. The attack when he came home last--"

When Ma went out, sigh followed sigh in the darkness.

Late in the evening Ma sat and held her daughter's head so that she could get some sleep; she was continually starting up.

And now when Thinka finally slept, without these sudden starts any longer--quietly and peacefully, with her fair young head regularly breathing on the pillow--Ma went out with the candle. The worst was over.

If the captain was in an exalted mood after having seen from the office window Aslak, who went as express messenger to the sheriff, vanishing through the gate, then in certain ways he was doubly set up in the kingdom of hope by a little fragment of a letter from Inger-Johanna, dated Tilderöd:

We are all in a bustle, packing up and moving to the city, therefore the letter will be short this time.

There have been guests here to the very last; solitude suits neither uncle nor aunt, and so they had said "Welcome to Tilderöd" so often that we had one long visit after another all through the summer--in perfect rusticity, it was said. But I believe indeed they did not go away again without feeling that aunt preserves style in it. With perfect freedom for every one, and collations both in the garden room and on the veranda, there is, after all, something about it which makes the guests feel that they must give something and be at their best. People don't easily sink down to the level of the commonplace when aunt is present. She flatters me that we are alike in that respect.

And I don't know how it is, I feel now that I am almost as much attracted by assemblies as formerly by balls. There certainly is much more of an opportunity to use whatever little wit one has, and they may be a real influential circle of usefulness: aunt has opened my eyes to that this summer. When we read of the brilliant French _salons_, where woman was the soul, we get an impression that here is an entire province for her. And to be able to live and work in the world has possessed me since I was little, and mourned so that I was not a boy who could come to be something.

I had got so far, dear parents, when Miss Jörgensen called me to go down into the garden to aunt. The mail had come from the office in the city, and on the table in a package lay a flat, red morocco leather box and a letter to me.

It was a gold band to wear in my hair, with a yellow topaz in it, and in the letter there was only, "To complete the portrait. RÖNNOW."

Of course aunt must try it on me at once--take down my hair, and call in uncle. Rönnow's taste was subtly inspired when it concerned me, she declared.

Oh, yes! it is becoming.

But with the letter and all the fantastical overvaluation, there is that which makes me feel that the gold band pinches my neck. Gratitude is a tiresome virtue.

Aunt lays so many plans for our social life next winter, and is rejoicing that Rönnow may possibly come for another trip.

For my part I must say I don't really know; I both want it and don't want it.

_Chapter X_

The more quickly and quietly the wedding could be arranged, the better, said the sheriff. It had its advantage in getting ahead of explanations and gossip. People submitted to an accomplished fact.

The third day of Christmas was just the right one to escape too much sensation; and it suited the sheriff exactly, so that he could enter upon his new state of household affairs with the new year.

Naturally, Kathinka was asked about every one of these points; and she always found everything that her father thought right.

The decision that the wedding should be arranged speedily and promptly was exactly after the captain's own heart. On the other point, on the contrary, that everything should be kept so quiet and still, he was in agreement with the sheriff and Ma, of course; but it really did not lie in his nature that the whole joyful affair should take place smothered with a towel before his mouth, and whispering on tiptoe, as if it were a sick-room they were having at Gilje instead of a wedding.

Some show there must be about it; that he owed to Thinka, and to himself also a little.

And thus it came about that before Christmas he took a little sleighing trip, when it was good going, down to the lieutenant's and to the solicitors, Scharfenberg and Sebelow, with whom he had some money settlements to get adjusted in regard to the map business that had been done in the last two suits.

And then, when he met the report that the banns had been published in church for his daughter and the sheriff, he could answer with a question if they would not come and convince themselves. Confidentially, of course, he invited no one but the army surgeon and those absolutely necessary. "But"--winking--"old fellow, how welcome you shall be, the third day of Christmas, not the second and not the fourth, my boy, remember that!"

And he took care that provisions as well as batteries of strong liquors should be stored up inside the ramparts at home, so the fortress could hold its own.

On Christmas Eve there came a horse express from the sheriff with a sleigh full of packages--nothing but presents and surprises for Thinka.

First and foremost, his former wife's warm fur cloak with squirrel-skin lining and muff, which had been made over for Thinka by Miss Brun in the chief parish; then her gold watch and chain with earrings, and rings, all like new, and burnished up by the goldsmith in the city, and a Vienna shawl, and, lastly, lavender water and gloves in abundance.

In the letter he suggested to his devotedly loved Kathinka that his thoughts were only with her until they should soon be united by a stronger bond, and that she, when once in her new home, would find several other things which might possibly please her, but which it would not be practical to send up to Gilje, only to bring them right back again.

He had not brought Baldrian and Viggo home for Christmas--and in this he hoped she would agree with him; he had sent them down to his brother, the minister at Holmestrand.

Never in Great-Ola's time had there been such a festive show in horses and vehicles, as when, on the third day of Christmas, they started down the hill to the annex-church; the harnesses and bells shone, and both the black horses glistened before the double sleighs, as if they had been polished up, both hair and mane.

Under the bearskin robe in the first sat the captain in a wolf-skin coat and Thinka adorned with the chains and clothes of the sheriff's first wife, with young Svarten. In the second Ma and Thea, with Great-Ola on the dickey seat behind and old Svarten.

There stood the subalterns in uniform paying their respects at the church door; and inside, in the pew, Lieutenants Dunsack, Frisak, Knebelsberger, and Knobelauch rose up in full uniform. So the sheriff could see that there was some style about it, anyway.

And when they turned towards home, after the ceremony was over, now with the captain and his wife in the first sleigh and the wedded couple in the other--there was such a long cortège that the sheriff's idea of celebrating the wedding quietly must be regarded as wholly overridden.

At Gilje dinner was waiting.

During this the powers of the battalion from the youngest lieutenant up to the captain developed a youthful courage in their attack on the strong wares, so wild and so regardless of the results, that it could only demand of the sheriff a certain degree of prudence.

All would drink with the bride and the bridegroom, again and again.

The sheriff sat contented and leaning forward with his great forehead thinly covered with hair, taking pains to choose his words in the cleverest and most fitting manner for the occasion.

And so long as it was confined to the speeches, he was the absolute master, unless he might possibly have a rival in the army surgeon's sometimes more deeply laid satire, which became more problematical and sarcastic after he had been drinking.

But now the small twinkling eyes, shining more and more dimly and tenderly veiled, devoted themselves exclusively to the bride.

She must taste the tower tart and the wine custard, for his sake! He would not drink any more, if he could avoid it, for her sake. "I assure you," for your--"only for your sake."

An inroad was made on the wares at Gilje with prolonged hilarity till far into the night, when some of the sleighs in the starlight and in the gleam of the Northern lights reeled homewards with their half unconscious burdens drawn by their sober horses, while as many as the house would hold remained over in order to celebrate the wedding and Christmas the next day.

By New Year's the house was finally emptied of its guests, the sheriff and Kathinka were installed in their home, and the captain travelled down on a visit to them with Thea in order to have his New Year's Day spree there.

But then Ma was tired out and completely exhausted.

She felt, now the wheel of work had stopped all at once, and she sat there at home alone, on the day after New Year's, how tremendous a load it had been to pull. The trousseau all through the autumn and the household affairs before the holidays, Christmas, and the wedding, and all the anxieties.

It had gone on incessantly now, as far back as she could think. It was like ravelling out the yarn from a stocking, the longer she thought, the longer it was, clear back to the time when it seemed to her there was a rest the days she was lying in childbed.

But that was now long since.

She was sitting in the corner of the sofa half asleep in the twilight, with her knitting untouched before her.

Aslak and two of the girls had got leave to go to a Christmas entertainment down at the Skreberg farm, and except old Torbjörg, who was sitting with her hymn book and humming and singing in the kitchen, there was no one at home.

Bells jingled out in the yard. Great-Ola had come home with the two-seated sleigh and old Svarten, after having driven the captain and Thea.

He stamped the snow off in the hall and peeped in through the door.

When he drove past Teigen, the postmaster had come out with the captain's mail.

"When did you get there last evening? I hope Thea was not cold."

"No, not at all! We were down there in good time before supper. Ever so many messages from the young wife; she was down in the stable and patted and stroked Svarten last night. It was kind of a separation."

Ma rose. "There is a candle laid out for the stable lantern."

Great-Ola vanished again.

Old Svarten, still harnessed to the sleigh, stood in the stable door and neighed impatiently.

"It only lacked that you should turn the key also," growled Ola, while he took off the harness, and, now with the harness and bells over his arm, let the horse walk in before him.

"Why, if young Svarten isn't neighing also! That was the first time you have said a decent good day here in the stable, do you know that? But you will have to wait, you see."

He curried and brushed and rubbed the new arrival like a privileged old gentleman. They had been serving together now just exactly nine years.

In the kitchen the spruce wood crackled and snapped on the hearth, casting an uncertain reddish glow over Ma's newly polished copper and tin dishes and making them look like mystical shields and weapons hung on the walls.

Great-Ola was now sitting there making himself comfortable with his supper, Christmas cheer and entertainment--butter, bread, bacon, wort-cakes, and salt meat; and Torbjörg had been ordered to draw a bowl of small beer for him down in the cellar. Ola had heard one thing and another down there.

Thinka, she had gone out into the kitchen and would take charge of the housekeeping immediately. But there she found some one who meant to hold the reins.

Old Miss Gülcke wouldn't hear of that. She went straight up to the office, they said, and twisted and turned it over with her brother the whole forenoon till she got what she wanted.

And in the evening the sheriff sat on the sofa and talked so sweetly to the young wife. Beret, the chamber-maid, heard him say that he wanted her to have everything so extremely nice and be wholly devoted to him, so that--Horsch, the old graybeard! We can see now what he was doing here last year.

"And thereby," said Ola, with a mouthful between his teeth, while he cut and spread a new slice of bread, "she got rid of the trouble and the management too."

"It is of no use to pull the noose when one has his head in a snare, you see, Ola."

In the sitting-room Ma had examined the mail that had come, sitting by the stove door. Besides a number of _Hermoder_, _The Constitutional_, and a free official document, there was a letter from Aunt Alette.

She lighted the candle and sat down to read it.

In certain respects it was a piece of good fortune that Jäger was not at home. He ought to have nothing to do with this.

DEAR GITTA,--I have taken the second Christmas day to write down for you my thoughts concerning Inger-Johanna. I cannot deny that she has come to interest me almost more than I could wish; but, if we can feel a certain degree of anxiety for the smallest flower in our window, which is just going to blossom, how much more then for a human bud, which in the developing beauty of its youth is ready to burst out with its life's fate. This is more than a romance, it is the noble art work of the Guide of all, which in depth and splendor and immeasurable wealth surpasses everything that human fantasy is able to represent.

Yes, she interests me, dear Gitta! so that my old heart almost trembles at thinking of the life path which may await her, when rise or fall may depend on a single deceptive moment.

What can Nature mean in letting such a host of existences, in which hearts are beating, succumb and be lost in this choice, or does it thereby in its great crucible make an exact assay, without which nothing succeeds in passing over into a more complete development--who can unriddle Nature's runes? My hope for Inger-Johanna is that the fund or the weight of personality, which she possesses in her own nature, will preponderate in the scales of her choice in the decisive moment.

I premise all this as a sigh from my innermost heart; for I follow with increasing dread how the path is made more and more slippery under her feet, and how delicately your sister-in-law weaves the net around her, not with small means to which Inger-Johanna would be superior, but with more deep-lying, sounding allurements.

To open up the fascinating prospect of making her personal qualities and gifts count--what greater attraction can be spread out before a nature so ardently aspiring as hers? It is told of Englishmen that they fish with a kind of counterfeited, glittering flies, which they drag over the surface of the water until the fish bites; and it appears to me that in no less skilful manner your sister-in-law continually tempts Inger-Johanna's illusions. She never mentions the name of the one concerned, so that it may dawn upon her of itself.

Only the careless hint to me, in her hearing, the last time I was there, that Rönnow had certainly for some time been rather fastidiously looking for a wife among the _élite_ of our ladies--why was not that calculated to excite, what shall I call it, her ambition or her need of having a field of influence?

Perhaps I should not have noticed this remark to that extent if I had not seen the impression it made on her; she was very absent-minded and lost in thoughts.

And yet the question of whether one should give her heart away ought to be so simple and uncomplicated! Are you in love? Everything else only turns on--something else.

The unfortunate and fateful thing is if she imagines she is able to love, binds herself in duty to love, and thinks that she can say to her immature heart: You shall never awaken. Dear Gitta, suppose it did awaken--afterwards--with her strong, vigorous nature?

It is that which hovers before me so that I have been compelled to write. To talk to her and make her prudent would be to show colors to the blind; she must believe blindly in the one who advises her. Therefore it is you, Gitta, who must take hold and write.

Ma laid the letter down in her lap; she sat in the light, looking paler and sharper even than common.

It was easy for Aunt Alette, the excellent Aunt Alette, to think so happily that everything should be as it ought to be. She had her little inheritance to live on and was not dependent on any one. But--Ma assumed a dry, repellent expression--without the four thousand, old and tormented in Miss Jörgensen's place at the governor's, she would not have written that kind of angelic letter.

Ma read on:

I must also advance here some further doubts, so that you will certainly think this is a sad Christmas letter. This, then, is about dear Jörgen, who finds it so hard at school. That he has thus far been able to keep up with his class, we owe to Student Grip, who, persistently and without being willing ever to hear a word about any compensation, has gone over with him and cleared up for him his worst stumbling-blocks, the German and the Latin grammar.

And if I now express his idea in regard to Jörgen, it is with no small degree of confidence that it may be well founded. He says that so far from Jörgen's having a poor head, it is just the opposite. Only he is not made for the abstract, which is the requisite for literary progress, but all the more for the practical.

In connection with a sound, clear judgment, he is both dexterous and inventive. Jörgen would be an excellent mechanic or even a mechanical engineer, and would come to distinguish himself just as certainly as he will reap trouble, difficulty, and only extremely moderate results by toiling from examination to examination in his studies.

To be sure, I cannot subscribe to Student Grip's somewhat youthful wild ideas about sending him to be an apprentice in England (or even so far as to the American Free States!) inasmuch as a mechanic cannot here obtain a respected rank in society, such as is said to be the case in the above named lands.

Still, much of this, it seems to me, is worth taking into serious consideration.

I sometimes almost doubt whether, old as I am, nevertheless I might be too young. Call it the fruit of inner development or simply an attraction, but the thoughts of the young always exert an enlivening and strengthening influence on my hope of life. Still, I never reconcile myself to the thought that our ideals must inevitably, by a kind of natural law, become exhausted and weakened and break from age like any old earthenware.

And when I see a young man like Grip judged so severely by the so-called practical men--not, so far as I understand, for his ideas of education, but because he would sacrifice himself and put them in operation--I cannot avoid giving him my whole sympathy and respect.

Now he has abandoned law and devoted himself to the study of philology; for, he says, in this country no work is of any use without a sign-board, and he will now try to get a richly gilded one in an excellent examination, seize hold of untrodden soil, like the dwarf birches upon the mountain, and not let go, even if a whole avalanche comes over him.

When it is considered that he must work hard and teach several hours daily only to be able to exist, I cannot but admire his fiery courage and--true, I have not many with me--wish him good luck.

Ma sat pondering.

Then she cut out the page which spoke of Jörgen. It might be worth while, if opportunity offered, to show it to Jäger. In the simplicity of her heart, she really did not know what to think.

_Chapter XI_

Everything was white now in the very heart of winter, white from the window-panes in the sitting-room to the garden, the fields, and the mountain slopes, white as the eye glided over the mountain-tops up to the sky, which lay like a semi-transparent, thickly frosted window-pane and shut it all in.

It was cold here, the warm-blooded captain maintained. He began to amuse himself with feeling and tracing out where there was a draught, and then with pasting long strips of paper with cloth and oakum under it. And then he used to go out from his work, with only his wig, without his hat, and chat with the people in the stable or at the barn, where they were threshing.

They were lonely there now with only Ma, Thea, and himself; no one understood what Thinka had been for him!

At last he ended in pondering on laying out fox-traps and traps and spring-guns for wolves and lynx in the hill pastures.

Ma was obliged a hundred times a day to answer what she thought, even if she had just as much idea about it as about pulling down the moon.

"Yes, yes, do it, dear Jäger."

"Yes, but do you believe it will pay--that is what I am asking about--to go to the expense of fox-traps?"

"If you can catch any, then--"

"Yes, if--"

"A fox skin is certainly worth something."

"Hadn't I better try to put out bait for lynx and wolf?"

"I should think that would be dearer."

"Yes, but the skin--if I get any; it depends on that, you see."

Then he would saunter thoughtfully out of the door, to come back an hour later and again and again fill her ears with the same thing.

Ma's instinct told her that the object of his first catch was really she; if she allowed herself to be fooled into giving positive advice, he would not forget to let her feel the responsibility for the result, if it should be a loss.

To-day he had again been pondering and going over the affair with her, when they were surprised by the sheriff's double sleigh driving up to the steps.

The hall door, creaking with the frost, flew open under the captain's eager hand.

"In with you into the sitting-room, Sheriff."

Behind his wolf-skin coat Thinka emerged, stately and wrapped up in furs.

"Your most obedient servant, kinsman, and friend."

The sheriff was on a business trip farther up, and asked for hospitality for Thinka for two or three days, till he came back; he would not omit to claim her again promptly. And, in the next place, he must ask of his father-in-law the loan of a small sleigh for his further journey; he should be way up in Nordal's annex this evening.

Thinka already had Torbjörg and Thea competing each for one of her snow-stockings to get them off, and Marit was not free from eagerly peeping in at the door.

"You shall, in any event, have a little something to eat and some tea-punch, while the horse gets its breath, and they make the sleigh ready."

The sheriff did not have much time to waste, but the sun of family life shone too mildly here for him not to give a half hour, exactly by the clock.

He made one or two attempts to get his things off, but then went to Thinka.

"You have tied the knot in my silk handkerchief so well that you will have to undo it yourself. Thanks, thanks, my dear Thinka.--She spoils me completely. Nay, you know her, Captain."

"You see what she has already begun to be for me," he said later, appealing with a pleasant smile to his father-in-law and mother-in-law at the hastily served collation--he must have his tea-punch poured out by Thinka's hand.

When the sheriff, carefully wrapped up by his young wife, was followed out to the sleigh, Thinka's tea stood there almost untouched and cold; but Ma came now with a freshly filled hot cup, and they could sit down to enjoy the return home in peace.

He is certainly very good, Ma thought--he had guessed that Thinka was homesick.

"The sheriff is really very considerate of you, Thinka, to let you come home so soon," she said.

"Fine man! Would have to hunt a long time for his like!" exclaimed the captain with a full, strong bass. "Treats you like a doll, Thinka."

"He is as good as he can be. Next week Miss Brun is coming to make over a satin dress for me; it has only been worn once. Gülcke will have me so fine," said Thinka, by way of illustration. The tone was so quiet that it was not easy for Ma to tell what she meant.

"The fellow stands on his head for you; don't know what he will hit upon."

Besides his wish to meet his wife's longing for home, the sheriff may possibly also have determined to take her with him from a little regard for the younger powers in the principal parish--Buchholtz and Horn. They had begun to visit at his house somewhat often and evidently to feel at home there, after a young, engaging hostess had come to the house.

Towards evening the captain had a quiet game of picquet.

It seemed as if comfort accompanied Thinka. Her mediatorial and soothing nature had come to the house again; it was felt both in parlor and kitchen.

Father came again in the forenoon for a little portion of oat cake and whey cheese when they were cooking salt meat and peas in the kitchen, and Ma found first one thing and then another done for her and was anticipated in many handy trifles, notwithstanding that Thinka also had to finish a pair of embroidered slippers that Gülcke had expressed a wish for. But there was plenty of time for that. She got well along on the pattern while her father was taking his noonday nap, and she sat up there and read him to sleep.

The captain found it so comfortable when he saw the needle and worsted flying in Thinka's hand--it was so peacefully quiet--it was impossible not to go to sleep.

And then he was going to have her for only three days.

While her fingers were moving over the canvas, Kathinka sat having a solitary meditation--

Aas had sent her a letter when he heard of her marriage. He had believed in her so that he could have staked his life on her constancy, and even if many years were to have passed, he would have worked, scrimped, and scraped in order at last to have been able to reach her again, even if they should then both have left their youth behind them. It had been his joyful hope that she would keep firm and wait for him even through straits and poor circumstances. But now that she had sold herself for goods and gold, he did not believe in any one any more. He had only one heart, not two; but the misfortune was, he saw it more plainly, that she also had--

"Huf! I thought I heard you sighing deeply," said the captain, waking up; "that comes from lying and struggling on one's back. Now we shall have some coffee."

Even if Thinka could not answer Aas, still she would try to relieve her heart a little to Inger-Johanna. She had brought her last letter with her to answer in this period of calm at home, and was sitting up in her room with it before her, in the evening.

"Inger-Johanna is fortunate, as she has nothing else to think of," she said to herself, sighing and reading:

And you, Thinka, you also ought to have your eye on your part of the country, and make something out of the place into which you have now come; it is indeed needed up there, for there is no doubt that society has its great mission in the refinement of customs and the contest against the crude, as aunt expresses it.

I am not writing this for nothing, nor wholly in the air; I stand, indeed, too near to many conditions to be able to avoid thinking of the possibility of sometime being placed in such a position. If I said anything else, I should not be sincere.

And I must tell you, I see a great many things I should like to help in. It must be that a place can be found for a good many ideas which now, as it were, are excommunicated.

Society ought to be tolerant, aunt says; why, then, cannot such views as Grip's be discussed peacefully? The first thing I would do would be to go in for being extravagant and defending them. In a woman, nevertheless, this is never anything more than piquancy. But ideas also must fight their way into good society.

I ponder and think more than you can imagine; I feel that I ought to put something right, you see.

And I am not any longer so struck with the wisdom of men altogether. A woman like aunt keeps silent and pulls the strings; but you can never imagine how many are led by her strings. She is, between ourselves, a little diplomatic, in an old-fashioned way, and full of flourishes, so that she almost makes it a pleasure to have it go unobserved and by a roundabout way. Straight out would many times be better, I believe; at any rate, that is my nature.

And still a little warning with it, Thinka (oh, how I feel I speak as if I were in aunt's skin!) Remember that no one ever rules a room except from a place on the sofa; I know you are so modest that they are always getting you off on the chairs. You are not at all so stupid as you imagine; only you ought not to try to hide what you think.

If I should sometime meet Grip again, I should convince him that there may be other ways to Rome than just going head foremost at it! I have got a little notion of my own since he last domineered me, with his contempt for society, and was always so superior. But I have not had more than one or two glimpses of him on the street the whole winter. He is so taken up by his own affairs; and it isn't proper, uncle says, to invite him to _soirées_, since he has pledged himself to certain strong ideas, which one does not dare to hint at without provoking a very serious dispute. In one or two gentlemen parties he has been entirely too grandiloquent--drank too much, uncle thought. But I know so well why. He must hit upon something, he used to say, when he gets tired and bored too much, and at the Dürings there is a dreadful vacuum.

Thinka had read the letter through; there might be much to think of, but she was so taken up by Aas--she was never done with rolling that millstone.

* * * * *

During the monotony of winter, in the middle of February, a letter was received, which the captain at first weighed in his hand and examined two or three times--white, glossy vellum paper, C. R. in the seal--and he tore it open.

Yes, to be sure, it was from Rönnow!--his brilliant, running hand with the peculiar swing, which brought him to mind, as his elegant form, with a jaunty tread, moved up and down.

CAPTAIN PETER JÄGER,--Highly esteemed, dear old comrade and friend:

I shall not preface this with any long preludes about position in life, prospects, etc., but go straight on with my prayer and request.

As you have seen that my cards are lucky--really more as they have been dealt than as I have played them--you will certainly understand that in the last two or three years I have found it proper to look about for a wife and a partner for life who would be suitable for my condition. But during the whole of my seeking there was hidden in the most secret corner of my heart a black-haired, dark-eyed girl, whom I first saw by the card-table one winter evening up at Gilje, and whom I have since seen again and again with ever more fascination during her development into the proud woman and lady whose superior nature was incontestable.

Now, with my round six-and-forty years, I shall not hold forth with any long tale of my love for her, although, perhaps, there might be a good deal to say on that point also. That I am not old inwardly I have at all events fully found out on this occasion.

It goes without saying that I do not address my prayer to you without having first satisfied myself by a close and long acquaintance that your daughter also could cherish some feelings responsive to mine.

That the result has not been to my disadvantage is apparent from her precious reply to me, received yesterday, in which I have her yes and consent.

In the hope that a sincere conduct and intention will not be misconstrued, I herewith address the prayer and the question to you and your dear wife--whether you will trust to me the future of your precious Inger-Johanna?

What a man can do to smooth and make easy her path of life, that I dare promise, on my _parole d'honneur_, she shall never lack.

I will also add that when the court, towards the end of May or the early part of June, goes to Christiania, I shall be on duty and go too. I shall then be able again to see her on whom all my hope and longing are placed.

In anxious expectation of your honored answer,

Most respectfully, Your always faithful friend, CARSTEN RÖNNOW

Here was something better to think about than to talk with Ma about fox-traps and spring-guns.

There would not be any after-dinner nap to-day.

He rushed out into the yard with great force: another man must thresh in the barn; the manure must be drawn out; they must hurry!

He came in and seated himself on the sofa and lighted a lamplighter, but jumped up again while he held it to his pipe. He remembered that a message must be sent to the smith to mend the harrows and tools for spring.

There was no help for it, he must go down and tell the news to the sheriff himself.

_Chapter XII_

During the first days of March Inger-Johanna wrote:

This comes so close upon my former, because I have just received a letter from Rönnow about something on which I would gladly, dear parents, have you stand on my side, when you, as I foresee, receive aunt's explicit and strong representation and reasons in the opposite direction.

Rönnow already writes as if it were something certain and settled that we should have the wedding in the summer, in June or July. Aunt wants it at her house, and hopes that, in any event, you, father, will come down.

Rönnow urges so many amiable considerations which speak for it, and I do not at all doubt that aunt in her abundant kindness will take care to make it doubly sure with a four-page letter full of reasons.

But against all this I have only one thing to say, that I, at the time I gave my consent to Rönnow, did not at all foresee such haste without, as it were, a little time and breathing-space for myself.

It is possible that others cannot understand this feeling of mine, and especially it seems that aunt thinks it does not exactly show the degree of heartiness of feeling that Rönnow could expect.

But to the last, which is certainly the only one of the whole number she can urge that is worth answering, I will only say, that it cannot possibly be Rönnow's intent to offend my innermost sensibilities when he learns how I feel about it.

I only ask for suitable time--for instance, till some time next winter. I should so much like to have this year, summer and autumn at least, a little in quiet and peace. There is so much to think over, among other things my future position. I want first to study the French grammar through, and I should prefer to do it at home alone, and generally to prepare myself. It is not merely like jumping into a new silk dress.

Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I could be at Gilje this summer! I sat yesterday thinking how delightful it was there last year on the high mountains!

No, aunt and I would not agree permanently. Her innermost, innermost peculiarity (let it be never so well enveloped in amiability and gentle ways of speech) is that she is tyrannical. Therefore she wants now to manage my wedding, and therefore--which can now vex and disturb me, so that I haven't words for it!--she has in these days got my good-natured (but not especially strong-minded, it would be a pity to say that!) uncle to commit the act, which is far from being noble, of dismissing Grip from his position in the office. It is just like robbing him of half of what is needed to enable him to live and study here, and that only because she does not tolerate his ideas.

I let her know plainly what I thought about it, that it was both heartless and intolerant; I was so moved.

But why she pursues him to the seventh and last--for with aunt there is always something for the seventh and last--that I should still like to know.

Regard must naturally be paid to Inger-Johanna's wish to postpone the wedding. And so there was writing and writing to and fro.

But then came Rönnow's new promotion and with it the practical consideration, which weighed on the scales, that housekeeping must be begun on moving-day in October.

* * * * *

There was a general brushing up at Gilje from top to bottom, inside and out. The rooms upstairs must be whitened and everything put in order for the arrival of the newly married couple to remain this summer, the whole of July, after the wedding.

And when Inger-Johanna should come she was to meet a surprise--the whole of the captain's residence, by order of the army department, newly painted red with red-lead and white window sashes.

The captain's every-day coat had a shower of spots at all times in the day, as he stood out by the painter's ladder and watched the work--first the priming and now the second coat; then came the completion, the third and last. The spring winds blew, so that the walls dried almost immediately.

He was a little dizzy off and on during all this, so that he must stop and recover his balance; but there was good reason for it, because the parish clerk this year had not taken enough blood, since he had become so much stouter!--and then perhaps he pushed on too hard and eagerly; for he did long for Inger-Johanna's return.

He talked of nothing but Inger-Johanna, of her prospects, beauty, and talents, and how Ma could not deny that he had seen what there was in her from the time when she was very small.

But Ma still thought privately, while he was going about boisterous and happy, that he had been less stout and more healthy when he had more anxieties and had to take the world harder. She had let him into the secret of Aunt Alette's misgivings in respect to Jörgen's capacities for scholarship.

"I have not been able to avoid thinking, Jäger, that Jörgen might not find happiness in that line."

"In what line, then?--Be a shoemaker and lie on one knee and take the measure of us others, perhaps--Oh-ho, no," stretching himself with superabundant conviction, "if we can afford to keep him at his studies, he can easily learn. There are many more stupid than he who have attained the position of both minister and sheriff."

One day the captain hastily separated a letter from Aunt Alette from his official mail, and threw it on the table for Ma to read through at her convenience. If there was anything in it, she could tell it to him, he shouted back, as he went up the stairs to his office; he had become a great deal heavier and more short of breath lately, and took a firmer hold on the stair rail.

_May 1, 1844_

MY DEAREST GITTA,--It is with a certain sad, subdued feeling that I write to you this time; nay, I could even wish to characterize it by a stronger expression. It comes to my old ears as if there was a lamentation sounding over so many bright hopes bowing their heads to the ground; and I can only find consolation in the firm faith, cherished through a long life, that nothing happens save as a link in a higher wisdom.

Just as I have hitherto tried to present everything relating to Inger-Johanna as clearly before you as I could see it myself, so I find it most proper not to conceal from you the struggle which she plainly is going through against a feeling, from whose power I hope there may yet be salvation in the fortunate circumstance that it has not yet had full time to come into being and ripen in her.

It is there, and it produces pain, but more, is my hope, as a possibility, which has not put out sufficient roots, than as a reality, a living growth, which could not, without injury to her innermost being, coldly be subdued and stifled again.

But never has shrewd calculation celebrated a more sorry triumph than when the governor's wife believed that she could find a remedy by keeping the person concerned at a distance and at last even by persecuting him, in order to make it impossible for him to support himself here. When it is considered that Inger-Johanna, during all the treatment that Grip has endured for his ideas, has plainly sympathized with, almost championed them, the result should not have been difficult to foresee.

And one cold, frosty morning early this winter, Inger-Johanna came here in great mental excitement to make an examination into his condition through Jörgen. It was then also at her appeal that Jörgen asked him to teach him four hours a week.

On this occasion I saw clearly what before I had only suspected, but which had not escaped your sister-in-law's sharp eye, that Student Grip, without Inger-Johanna's having any idea of it, had engrossed her as a personality that drew her more and more.

It is of no use to conceal it; it is a crisis which must be fought through, before she finally becomes any other person's, if her position is not to be a false one, and if she is not to support a lifelong sorrow.

That the news of her betrothal has fallen like a saddening disappointment of a hope (even if a remote one) on this young man, I regard as far from improbable.

I certainly cannot forget the two serious young faces, which for a moment stood looking at each other, when they met in my room one afternoon. There was not much said.

She knew that he had been wronged and she hinted something to that effect.

"Possibly, Miss Jäger," he said harshly, while he took hold of the door-knob. "So many soap-bubbles burst."

Inger-Johanna remained standing and looking down on the floor. It was as if an entire change had come over her; I am sure it dawned upon her what he felt.

The discharge from the governor's bureau has plainly enough been welcome to many of the families which immediately after with singular quickness seized the opportunity to dismiss him as tutor. A man of such strangely discordant ideas had long been thought not quite desirable to receive. And the example had been given.

From an honest heart I offered him a loan, so that he might live in peace for two or three months and study, until he could again get places to teach; but either he was too sore and proud, or else he thought that Inger-Johanna had a hand in it.

He has certainly taken it very much to heart that the total want of means of existence has now compelled him to give up the school, which was his pride, so that he is now in a certain way an object of ridicule, and this has capped the climax.

He goes about unoccupied, so Jörgen reports, and asks for credit at eating-houses and restaurants, where he sits out the evening and night.

I understood well enough that it was not just for the sake of her old aunt or for the thing itself, but to hear about him, that Inger-Johanna sat with me so often and learned the old-fashioned stitch with pearls and gold thread. She was in such an excited condition and so abstracted, and jumped up when Jörgen came home towards evening and, more's the pity, as often as not had been looking for him in vain to read with him.

That pale, darkly brilliant face stands so before me, Gitta, with which she one evening broke out: "Aunt--Aunt--Aunt Alette!"

It was like a hidden cry.

Where he is living now, Jörgen has not succeeded in finding out; possibly for want of means he has been turned out of his lodgings.

I narrate all this so much in detail, because it is to be believed and hoped that the severest part of the crisis, so far as she is concerned, is over now.

Since that evening, when she felt that she had forgotten herself, she has at least not talked about him, nor, as I know certainly, addressed a word to Jörgen. She has evidently esteemed his character very highly, and has now suffered a disappointment.

It is not well to be young and have a great deal of life that can suffer. I tell you, it is as with your teeth; there is no peace until you have them all in your table drawer.

No, all this was not anything for father, Ma thought.

* * * * *

Great-Ola was standing with a crowbar. There was a stone which was to be placed in the wall. But the frozen crust of earth was hard, up there on the meadow, although the sun was so roasting hot that he was obliged to wipe his forehead with his pointed cap every time he rested.

The non-commissioned officers had returned to the office during the forenoon with their pay in their pockets, one after the other; and that it was pretty bad going with holes in the highway was evident from their splashed carts, which were as if they had been dipped in the mud.

He had just got ready to put the crowbar under again, when he suddenly stopped. There was something which attracted his attention--a cariole with a post-boy walking by the side and a little yellow horse covered with mud up to its belly.

With pieces of rope for reins and wound around the cariole thills, the horse toiled up along the Gilje hills in zigzag, incessantly stopping to get breath. The sun was burning hot down there on the frozen earth.

The post down from Drevstad--he knew both the horse and the lumbering vehicle.

It was not that which would have taken his attention so seriously; but some one was sitting in it--a lady with hat and veil. He did not understand--that way of carrying the head--wasn't it--

He took two or three slow, thoughtful steps, then started on the jump, and over the wall with a leap which would have touched the roof-beam in a high room.

"Why, in the Lord's name, if it isn't Inger-Johanna herself!" he ejaculated, as he suddenly stood by the side of the horse. "What will the capt--"

At the sight of her he suddenly had a misgiving that perhaps everything might not be so well.

"And such a rattle-trap!" he said, recovering himself, "is that fit for Inger-Johanna?"

"Good morning, Great-Ola, is father at home, and mother? No, I am not so very well, but shall be better now."

She became silent again.

Great-Ola walked on, leading the horse by the reins, when Inger-Johanna drove into the yard.

There stood her father under the painting-ladder, looking up. He suddenly shaded his eyes, and was at once with her by the cariole.

"Inger-Johanna!"

She hugged him tightly out there, and the captain, dreadfully perplexed, drew her into the hall to Ma, who was standing there dumb.

"What is the matter, what is the matter, Inger-Johanna?" he burst out.

"Go in--go into the room a little, Jäger." She knew how little he could bear. "Let her talk with me first, and then we will come in to you--it is surely not anything irreparable."

"Father, Ma? Why should not father understand me?"

"Come, come, child," the captain made haste to say; he had hardly any voice left.

And she sat down there in the sitting-room with her father by her side on the sofa and her mother on a chair, and told them how she had fought and striven to make herself fancy that her life's task lay with Rönnow.

She had created for herself a whole pile of illusions.

But then, on one day--and she also knew which one--they became like extinguished lights for her--black as coal and empty, wherever she looked--not what she had thought, not what she meant--like throwing herself into a desert.

"And aunt insisted that I should choose the pattern of my wedding dress. I think I should have gone into it blindly, with my eyes shut, nevertheless; for I thought of you, father, what you would say, and of you, mother,--and of the whole world outside, what it would say, if I thus, without any trace of reason, broke my engagement. And then I considered that everything was settled. I had thrown myself into the water and was only sinking, sinking--I had no right now to do anything else than drown. But then--"

"Well," a short ominous cough; the captain sat looking on the floor with his hands on his knees.

"Then," resumed Inger-Johanna with a low voice, still paler, and violently impressed with her subject--"Nay, there need not be any secret from you, father, and you, mother, since you otherwise would not understand me;--it came almost like a flash of lightning upon me, that for wholly one year, and perhaps for two, I had had my whole soul bound up with another."

"Who is it?"

"Grip," she whispered.

The captain had sat patiently and listened--entirely patiently--till the last word. But now he flew up and placed himself before her; he struck his hands together on the backs, and stretched them out, utterly without self-control.

"But, kingdom of heaven!" he broke out at last. "Where are you!--What are you thinking of? You can't for a single moment ever think of comparing such a--Grip with a man like Rönnow?--I tell you, Inger-Johanna, your father is absolutely, totally--you--you might just as well rise up and strike me dead at once."

"Listen, father!" came from Inger-Johanna; at the same moment she sprang up and stood before him. "If Thinka and the others have not saved themselves, no one shall trample on me."

Ma continued sitting with sharp, compressed face.

"Such pure insanity!" The captain struck his fist against his forehead and walked up and down the floor disconsolately. "But now I see it;" he stopped again, nodding to himself. "You have been spoiled, dreadfully spoiled--spoiled, since you were little--And then we get it again, only because I think so much of you."

"The whole world could contradict me, father. I have only my right way to go--to do as I have done--write to Rönnow, give full explanation, and tell it to aunt. And," she leaned against the sofa and looked down bitterly, as the remembrance came over her, "aunt has done what she could, I can assure you--thought, as you do, father, that it was pure insanity. She was so fond of me that she did not care how much wretchedness it was for me if the match only came off. So vain and young as I was, she thought, all she had to do was to get Grip cried down and pursued, so that he should stand without means, hemmed in on all sides without any way out, a man made an object of ridicule, who was obliged to give up his purpose--only his father over again. It was so easily done, as he fought for his opinions unsupported, and it would be taken up so readily, as she knew." She stood there so self-assured, tremblingly lost in her own thoughts, with downcast eyes and dark brows. She had become thin and slim. "And now I have come home here with more sorrow than I can tell you or explain--so full of fear--"

There was a silence during which strange emotions were working in the captain. "Do you say that we are not fond of you--will do you harm? Well, then, perhaps, I might not consider it so right hereafter, what you have done. I say perhaps; but now I tell you that, if you must do it, then we shall stand by it, just as you yourself wish in the affair. You understand it, at all events. Why, you have not even sat down, child. Let her have something to eat, Ma, at once."

He started up. There was a good deal to be got out of the way in her room, so she should not see that repairs were going on.

_Chapter XIII_

The captain's house, freshly painted red, stood there on the hillside through the summer, and looked out over the country; it had become an ornament to the district.

But Great-Ola did not see how it was. Since the painting the captain was not like himself, some way or other. It did not have the right good luck with it. He came out there one time after another, and forgot what he came after, so that he must turn back again. Not a bad word to be heard from his mouth any longer, far from that, and he did not box one's ears.

The captain did not feel safe from dizziness this year. He went about continually making stops, and the one who must always go with him on his different trips over the grounds, stop when he stopped and go when he went, was Inger-Johanna. It was as if he seemed to find strength for himself in her erect carriage, and besides wanted to make sure that she was not going about grieving.

"Do you believe that she will ride or drive?" he asked Ma out in the pantry. "She stands there planting here and there and taking up and putting down in the garden; she is not accustomed to that now, Ma, you see. It seems to me, she is so serious. But can you imagine what will become of her? Huh," he sighed. "Nay, can you imagine it?" He took a ladle of whey out of the tub--"Drink plenty of whey, that thins the blood and prolongs life, Rist says--so that she can be the captain's daughter the longer here at Gilje--I have been thinking, Ma, that I am not going down to the sheriff's birthday on Thursday. Thinka is soon coming up, and--Oh, it is good to drink when one is thirsty."

On that same above named Thursday, the captain went about more than commonly silent and taciturn. Not a syllable at the dinner table, from the time he sat down till he rose again and peevishly, heavily, trudged up the stairs in order to take his after-dinner nap as it now should be, sitting and only for a moment.

He did not know whether he had closed his eyes or not; it didn't matter, either.

He rushed out of the office door--"Suppose they are now talking among themselves, Scharfenberg and the others. Just as amusing as to run the gauntlet through the whole country to travel down there." He stood absorbed before the great clothes-press out in the hall, when Inger-Johanna came up. "Will you see something?" said he--"your long boots when you were small."

She did not like to go into the housekeeping, but developed a great activity in outside affairs. For the present, the garden must be enlarged, the beds must be measured and spaded, and the hedge planted for Thinka's coming visit.

With a straw hat on, she was in the garden from early morning. There was such peace in being able to work in the fresh air and escaping from sitting over the sewing and thinking.

The captain went about shrinking from the drill.

Ma had several times proposed to send for Rist; but now she and Inger-Johanna in consultation determined really to do so.

Such a calming down always followed the doctor's visits.

Of course he should go to the drill-ground. A little lively marching in rank and file took off the fat so effectually and made the blood circulate as it should. "You have never yet talked about your head swimming when you were in camp, Jäger. It is just the right treatment, if you want to be allowed a glass of punch again on this side of Christmas."

While Gülcke was on the circuits, Thinka came up on a visit.

The sisters were at home again together, talking as in the old time; but neither of them wondered any longer what there might be in the outside world.

They knew that so well, both of them.

He felt so comfortable, the captain said, when he saw Thinka sitting there with her knitting-work and a novel, either out on the stairs or in the sitting-room.

"She is satisfied with her lot now, isn't she?" he said to Ma.

He came back to it so often; it was as if he had a secret disquietude on that point. By getting an insight into the matter through Inger-Johanna, he had to a degree got his eyes opened, at least to the extent of a suspicion, as to the possibility that a woman could be unhappy in a good match.

Then, on the other hand, his constant consolation was that such as Inger-Johanna must be exceptional examples of humanity--with her commanding nature and intolerance of living under any one's thumb.

But ordinary girls were not endowed with such lofty feelings and thoughts--and Thinka was, as it were, made for giving way and submitting to some one.

All the same, the question still lay and writhed like a worm in his stomach.

"Inger-Johanna!" said Thinka out on the stairs, "notice father, how unnerved he looks now, he is walking down there by the garden fence--and he is all the time forgetting his pipe; it is not halfsmoked up before it goes out."

"So you think he is changed," said Inger-Johanna, musing and resuming the conversation, up in their room in the evening. "Poor father; it is so absolutely impossible for him to get over it; I was destined to be a parade horse. But do you believe he would now demand it again of any of us?"

"You are strong, Inger-Johanna, and I suppose you are right. But he has become so good," Thinka said, sighing; "and it is that which makes me uneasy."

As the time drew nearer, he went about, dreading more and more to go to the camp, so that Ma finally began to believe that perhaps it was not advisable for him to go, since he had himself so little courage or desire for it. During the day, he would walk about quite alone, so that he might come to shun people altogether.

And the first real gleam of light she had seen for a long time on his countenance was when she, notwithstanding, proposed that he write to the army surgeon for a certificate of sickness.

It went on smoothly enough after it was first set in motion. And yet he seemed to repent it, so to speak, when his leave of absence actually lay upon his desk.

He went about annoyed and thought about them all down there. Now Captain Vonderthan would naturally spoil the men on the drill-ground; and this one and that one was speculating, he supposed, even now, on whether he would not possibly go upon half pay. But he would disappoint them by lasting as long as possible, if he should drink whey the year round.

The time, which was so absorbing and disturbing to his mind, when the drill was taking place, was over at last, and he had already, through Ma's persuasion, by degrees reconciled himself to a possible trip to the principal parish, when a scrap of a letter from Jörgen was brought in the mail, which put them all in great distress.

He could not endure any longer to sit there as the poorest in his class, and had shipped on board a vessel which was going to sail that evening for England. From there he hoped to find some means of getting over to America, where he would try to become a blacksmith or a wheelwright or something else. He would not fail to write home to his dear parents what his fate was.

"There, Ma," said the captain with a deep, trembling voice, when at last he had got over his stupefaction a little, "that Grip has been expensive for us. It is nothing but his teaching."

* * * * *

The autumn was already far advanced. The snow had come and gone twice, and had now been swept off by the wind from the slippery, hard frozen road. The slopes and mountains were white, with red and yellow tones of the frost-touched leaves of the leafy forest still showing in many places, and the lake down below was shining coldly blue, ready to freeze over.

There was a thundering over the country road hard with frost, so it waked the echoes in the quiet October day; one crow was standing, and another started up from the hedge-post at the sound.

It was the wheels of a cariole, and in it was sitting, with a long whip hanging down behind his back, in cloak and large overshoes, the Captain of Gilje.

He had been ten miles down and had his yearly settlement with Bardon Kleven.

It is true, the bailiff had not been willing to let him go out of the house without compelling him to taste a little brandy in a small tumbler, with a little ale in addition, and a little something to eat. But he had been prudent. It was almost the only trip he had made away from home for a long time, except his visit to the sheriff.

Old Svarten ran over the long, flat stretches in the heavy, strong trot to which he was accustomed; the road showed that he was sharp shod with full caulks. He knew that he was not to stop till he had done the three miles to the foot of the steep ascent up the Gilje hills.

It was probably because he was newly shod, and the lumps of mud were so large and were frozen hard; but now he stumbled.

It was the first time it had happened. Perhaps he felt it himself, for he kept on at a brisker trot--but then slackened up by degrees. He felt that the reins were loose and slack; their folds fell longer and longer down over his shoulders.

The whip-lash hung down as before over the captain's back, only still more slantingly.

He had begun to feel such cold shivers, just as if he had suddenly got cold all over--and now he had become so sleepy--had such a longing for a nap.

He saw the reins, the ears, and the hanging mane over the neck of Svarten nodding up and down before him, and the ground beneath him flying away--

It was just as if a crow flew up and made it dark right over his face; but he could not get his arm up to catch it--so let it be.

And there stood the grain-poles, like crooked old witches, crouched down--they wanted to avenge themselves--with straw forelocks they resisted him more and more like goblins and would forbid him to get his arms up to take the reins and drive to Gilje. They were swarming between heaven and earth, as it were, swimming, dancing--were bright and dark. Then there was something like a shout or a crash from somewhere. There was Inger-Johanna coming--

Svarten had got the reins quite down over his forelegs; a little more and he would be stepping on them.

From the gentle trot, into which he had at last fallen, he began to walk.

Then he turned his head round--and remained standing in the middle of the road.

The whip-lash hung down as before. The captain sat there immovable with his head a little tipped back--

They were still on the level, and Svarten stood patiently looking toward the Gilje hill, which lay a bit farther on, until he turned his head round again two or three times and looked into the cariole.

Now he began to paw on the ground with one forefoot, harder and harder--so that the lumps flew about.

Then he neighed.

A good hour later, in the twilight, there was a conversation in an undertone out in the yard, and the sound of cariole wheels which moved slowly.

Great-Ola was called down to the gate by the man down yonder at the Sörgaard; he had met the cariole with the captain down in the road.

"What is it?" Ma's voice was heard to say through the darkness from the porch.

* * * * *

At the entrance of the churchyard, a week later, old Svarten and young Svarten stood before an empty sleigh.

A salute before and after the lowering into the ground informed the parish that here lay Captain Peter Wennechen Jäger.

_Chapter XIV_

About twenty years had passed, and the traffic down in the country store and inn showed an entirely different style both in building and goods. There had also begun to be a route for travellers and tourists in the summer up through the valley.

The snow drifted, so that it lay high up on the steps this Sunday afternoon.

But in the little warm room behind the shop there was jollity. He had come up again, he, the delightful Grip; and now he was sitting there with the shopkeeper, the bailiff's man, and the execution-server.

Only let him get a little something to drink.

"Your health, you old execution-horse!" came in Grip's voice--"When I think of all those whom you have taken the skin off without ever getting any part in the roast, I can get up a kind of sympathy for you; we are both of us cheated souls."

"Although I have not acquired the learning and sciences"--began the gray-headed man who had been spoken to, somewhat irritated--"I insist on--"

"Everything lawful, yes--oh--oh--never mind that, Reierstad. Consider that science is the sea of infinity, and a few drops more or less do not count either for or against. Just peep out a little into the starry night, and you will have a suspicion that the whole of the planet, my friend, on which you parade in such a very small crevice, is only one pea in the soup--soup, I say--it is all the same. Isn't that so, Mr.--Mr. Simensen?"

He always appealed to the shop boy, who, with his small pig's eyes, smiled very superciliously and was evidently flattered.

"And in regard to the last information, one ought to have a little something to reinforce the oil in the lamp with, Sir."

It was the execution-server who had stood treat first--a pint and a half bottle of spirits.

The execution-server had a kind of ancient deferential respect for Grip. He knew that he had belonged to the higher sphere, and that he still, whenever he liked, might show himself in the houses both of the sheriff and of old Rist, places which he never left without improvements in his outfit.

"I will confide a secret to you, Reierstad. If you are a little of a genius, then you must drink--at least it was true in my time. There was great havoc on that kind, you see, on account of the vacuum. Did you not notice something of that?"

"Hi, hi, hi," neighed Simensen.

"Yes, you understand what I mean, Simensen?--A good glass of punch extract in this frost--of yours in the shop--would taste so good now, wouldn't it? I am not at present flush of money; but if you will have the goodness to put it down."

Simensen caught the idea, of course. "All right, then."

"As you grease the wheels, the carriage goes, you know very well, my dear Simensen--and, well,--there comes the fluid.--Do you want to know why we drink?"

"Oh, it can't be so very difficult to fathom that."

"No, no; but yet it may perhaps be placed in a higher light, which a man like you will not fail to appreciate--you know there is a great objection to new illumination fluids, besides--you see, hm!" He seated himself comfortably--"You live in a thin coat and cold, poor conditions--are ashamed of yourself at heart--feel that you are sinking as a man, day by day. If there is a discussion, you don't dare to assert yourself; if you are placed at a table, you don't dare to speak. And then--only two drams--two glasses of poor brandy for spectacles to see through--and _ein_, _zwei_, _drei_, _marsch_! The whole world is another!--You become yourself, feel that you are in that health and vigor which you were once intended for; your person becomes independent, proud, and bold; the words fall from your lips; your ideas are bright; people admire. The two glasses--only two glasses--I do not refuse, however, the three, four, five, and six, your health!--make the difference--you know what the difference is, Simensen!--between his healthy and his sick man, while the man whom the world struck down--well, yes--But the two glasses carry him always farther--farther--inexorably farther, you see--until he ends in the workhouse. That was a big syllogism."

"Yes, it certainly was," said Simensen, nodding to the execution-server; "it took half a bottle with it."

Grip sat there mumbling.

The strong drink had plainly got more and more hold on him; he had been out in the cold the whole day. His boots were wet and in bad condition. But he continued to drink; almost alone he had disposed of the punch extract.

"Come, come, don't sit there so melancholy--or there won't be any more to get," Simensen prodded him.

"No, no--no, no--more syllogisms, you mean--something Reierstad also can understand." He nodded his head in quiet, dull self-communion. "Came across an emaciated, pale child, who was crying so utterly helplessly down here. There is much that screams helplessly--you know, Reierstad!--if one has once got an ear for the music, and has not a river of tears--there, you drink, drink. Give me the bottle."

"It were best to get him to bed over in the servants' room, now," suggested Simensen.

"Perhaps the pig is drunk," muttered Grip.

Monday morning he was off again, before daylight, without having tasted anything; he was shy so early, before he had got his first dram to stiffen him up.

Grip had his own tactics. He was known over very nearly the whole of the country south of the Dovrefjeld.

As he had had fits of drinking and going on a spree, so he had had corresponding periods when he had lived soberly in the capital, studying and giving instruction. Again and again he awoke the most well-grounded hopes in his few old comrades and friends who remained there. A man with such a talent for teaching and such a remarkable gift for grasping the roots of words and the laws of language, not only in Greek and Latin, but right up into the Sanscrit, might possibly even yet attain to something. Based on his total abstinence for three and four months and his own strong self-control, they would already begin to speak of bringing about his installation at some school of a higher grade, when all at once, unexpectedly, it was again reported that he had disappeared from the city.

Then he would pop up again after the lapse of some weeks--entirely destitute, in one of the country districts, shaking and thin and worn from drink, from exposure, from lying in outhouses and in haylofts, seldom undressed and in a proper bed.

Along in the afternoon he appeared at the sheriff's house.

Gülcke was the only one of the functionaries of his time who still kept his office, after Rist had left. He was still there, nursed by a careful wife, who had ever surrounded him with a padding of pillows, visible and invisible.

Grip knew what he was doing; he wanted to find the mistress, while the sheriff was in his office.

She was sitting in an easy chair snugly behind the double windows in the sitting-room with her knitting-work and _The Wandering Jew_ before her, while her clever sister Thea, an unmarried woman now in the thirties, was looking after the dinner out in the kitchen.

Thinka took the care of the house upon herself after Miss Gülcke's death, and was her old husband's support and crutch unweariedly the whole twenty-four hours together.

And these greasy, worn books of fiction from the city, with numbers on their backs, were the little green spot left for her to pass her own life on.

Like so many other women of those times, to whom reality had not left any other escape than to take any man who could support her, she lived in these novels--in the midst of the most harshly creaking commonplaces--a highly strained life of fancy. There she imagined the passions she herself might have had. There were loves and hates, there were two noble hearts--in spite of everything--happily united; or she consoled picturesque heroes, who in despair were gazing into the billows.

There--in the clouds--was continued the life with its unquenchable thirst of the heart and of the spirit for which reality had not given any firm foothold--and there the matronly figure which had become somewhat large, cozily round and plump, and which was once the small, slender Thinka, transferred her still unforgotten Aas from one heroic form to another--from Emilie Carlén to James, from Walter Scott to Bulwer, from Alexander Dumas to Eugène Sue.

There in her domestic, bustling sister's place lay the sewing, with a ray of sunshine on the chair.

The dark inlaid sewing-table was Thea's inheritance from Ma. And the silver thimble, with the shell old and worn thin inside and out, broken and cracked at the top and on the edges, she used and saved, because her mother had used it all her time. It stood, left behind like a monument to Ma--to all the weary stitches--and pricks--of her honorably toiling, self-sacrificing--shall we call it life?

It was more at a pressure than by regularly knocking that the door to the sitting-room was opened, and Grip cautiously entered.

"You, Grip? No, no, not by the door, sit down up there by the window. Then my sister will get you a little something to eat,--oh, you can manage to eat a little bread and butter and salt meat, can't you? Well, so you are up this way, Grip?"

"Seeking a chance to teach, I may say, Mrs. Gülcke," was the evasive reply. "I am told you have heard from Jörgen over in America," he hastily added, to get away from the delicate subject.

"Yes, just think: Jörgen is a well-to-do, rich manager of a machine-shop over in Savannah. He has now written two letters and wants to have his eldest sister come over; but Inger-Johanna is not seeking for happiness any more--" she added with a peculiar emphasis.

There was a silence.

Grip, with a very trembling hand, placed the plate of bread and butter, which the maid had brought, on the sewing-table. He had drunk the dram on the side of the plate. There was a twitching about his lips.

"It gives me pleasure, exceeding great pleasure," he uttered in a voice which he controlled with difficulty. "You see, Mrs. Gülcke, that Jörgen has amounted to something I count as one of the few rare blades of grass that have grown up out of my poor life."

Sleigh-bells sounded out in the road; a sleigh glided into the yard.

"The judge's," Thinka said.

Grip comprehended that he would not be wanted just now, and rose.

Thinka hastened out into a side room and came in again with a dollar bill--"Take it, Grip--a little assistance till you get some pupils."

His hand hesitated a little before he took it. "One--must--must--" He seized his cap and went out.

Down by the gate he stopped a little, and looked back. The window had been thrown open there.

"Airing out after Grip," he muttered bitterly, while he took the direction of the valley, with his comforter high up around his neck and his cap, which down in the main parish had replaced his old, curled up felt hat, down over his ears; in the cold east wind he protected his hands in the pockets of his old thin coat, which was flapping about his emaciated form.

It was not an uncommon route, whither he went over the mountains in his widely extended rambles in the summer, or, as now, in the short, dark midwinter, when he was obliged to confine himself to the highway.

This country district had an attraction for him, as it were; he listened and watched everywhere he came for even the least bit of what he could catch up about Inger-Johanna, while he carefully avoided her vicinity.

"The young lady of Gilje," as she was called, lived in a little house up there, which she had bought with one of the four thousand dollars that old Aunt Alette had given to her by will.

She kept a school for the children of the region, and read with those of the captain, the newly settled doctor, and the bailiff.

And now she had many boys to care for, whom she had got places in the country round about, while in the course of years she had striven to put several young geniuses from the neighborhood in the way of getting on down in the cities.

She was imperious, and gave occasion for people's talk by her unusually independent conduct; but to her face she met pure respect. She was still, at her fortieth year, delicate and slender, with undiminished, even if more quiet, fire in her eyes, and hair black as a raven.

She sought for talents in the children like four-leaved clover on the hills, as she was said to have expressed it; and when Grip, down at Thinka's, talked of Jörgen's happy escape from his surroundings as one of the few green leaves in his life, he then suppressed the most secret thought he cherished, that her little school was an offshoot propagated by his ideas.

In the twilight the next afternoon a form stole up to the fence around her schoolroom--the longing to catch, if possible, a glimpse of her drove him nearer and nearer.

Now he was standing close to the window.

An obscure form now and then moved before it.

An uncertain gleam was playing about in there from the mouth of the stove. The lamp was not yet lighted, and he heard the voice of a boy reciting something which he had learned by heart, but did not know well; it sounded like verse--it must be the children from the captain's house.

The entry door was open, and a little later he was standing in it, listening breathlessly.

He heard her voice--her voice.

"Recite it, Ingeborg--boys are so stupid in such things."

It was a poem from the Norwegian history. Ingeborg's voice came clearly:

_And that was young Queen Gyda, The flower in King Harald's spring-- Walks yet so proud a maiden Over the mountain ling?_

_Highborn was she and haughty, Her seat she would not share; The Hordaland damsels away she sent, And the Rogaland girls must fare._

_She willed a kingdom united To the outermost skerrie bare, A king for a queen, the whole of a man For a maid--and none to share._

He stood as if rooted to the floor, until he heard Inger-Johanna say, "I will now light the lamp, and give you your lessons for to-morrow."

Immediately he was away before the window.

He saw her head in the glow of the lamp just lighted--that purity in the shape of her eyebrows and in the lines of her face--that unspeakably beautiful, serious countenance, only even more characteristically stamped--that old erect bearing with the tall, firm neck.

It was a picture which had stood within him all these years--of her who should have been his if he had attained to what he ought to have attained in life--if it had offered him what it should have--and if he himself had been what he ought to have been.

He stood there stupefied as if in a dizzy intoxication--and then went away with long strides, when he heard the children coming out into the entry.

His feet bore him without his knowing it.

Now he was far down the Gilje hills, and the moonlight began to shine over the ridges. He still hurried on; his blood was excited; he saw--almost talked with her.

A sleigh came trotting slowly behind him with the bells muffled by the frost.

It was old Rist, who was sitting nodding in his fur coat, exhausted by what he had enjoyed at Gilje.

"If you are going over the lake, Grip, jump on behind," he said by way of salutation, after looking at him a little.

"I tell you, if you could only leave off drinking," he began to admonish--

Before the lamp thus--it ran in Grip's thoughts--she set the milky shade slowly down over the chimney, and a gleam passed over her delicate mouth and chin--the dark, closely fitting dress--and the forehead, while she bowed her magnificent head--she looked up--straight towards the window--

"And if you will only try to resist it--at the time the fit comes on--which is the same as the very Satan himself."

Grip was not inclined to hear any more, and it was cold to hang on over the lake.

He jumped off and let old Rist continue his talk in the idea that he was standing behind him.

It was a cold, biting wind out on the ice.

For a while he saw his own shadow, with his hands in his coat pockets, moving away, while the moon sailed through the clouds--the lamp shone so warmly on her face--

* * * * *

Three days afterwards, towards evening, Inger-Johanna stood at the window looking out. Her breast heaved with strong emotion.

Grip had died of pneumonia down at the Lövviggaard.

She had been down and taken care of him till now she had come home--talked with him, heard herself live in his wild raving, and had received his last intelligent look before it was quenched....

The moon was so cold and clear in the heavens. The whole landscape with the mountains and all the great pure forms shone magically white in the frost--white as in the snow-fields of the lofty mountains....

"The power of the spirit is great," she said, sighing in sorrowful, yet trembling meditation--"he gave me something to live on."

THE END

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