yet
been. It was a rather long, but not very high hothouse. The sun sparkled
and played over the glass-roof. They entered, the air was warm and
moist, and had a peculiar heavy aromatic odor as of earth that has just
been turned. The beautiful incised leaves and the heavy dewy grapes were
resplendent and luminous under the sunlight. They spread out beneath the
glass-cover in a great green field of blessedness. Thora stood there
and happily looked upward; Mogens was restless and stared now and then
unhappily at her, and then up into the foliage.

"Listen," Thora said gayly, "I think, I am now beginning to understand
what you said the other day on the hill about form and color."

"And you understood nothing besides?" Mogens asked softly and seriously.

"No," she whispered, looked quickly at him, dropped the glance, and grew
red, "not then."

"Not then," Mogens repeated softly and kneeled down before her, "but
now, Thora?" She bent down toward him, gave him one of her hands,
and covered her eyes with the other and wept. Mogens pressed the hand
against his breast, as he rose; she lifted her head, and he kissed her
on the forehead. She looked up at him with radiant, moist eyes, smiled
and whispered: "Heaven be praised!"

Mogens stayed another week. The arrangement was that the wedding was to
take place in midsummer. Then he left, and winter came with dark days,
long nights, and a snowstorm of letters.

*****

All the windows of the manor-house were lighted, leaves and flowers were
above every door, friends and acquaintances in a dense crowd stood on
the large stone stairway, all looking out into the dusk.--Mogens had
driven off with his bride.

The carriage rumbled and rumbled. The closed windows rattled. Thora
sat and looked out of one of them, at the ditch of the highway, at the
smith's hill where primroses blossomed in spring, at Bertel Nielsen's
huge elderberry bushes, at the mill and the miller's geese, and the hill
of Dalum where not many years ago she and William slid down on sleighs,
at the Dalum meadows, at the long, unnatural shadows of the horses that
rushed over the gravel-heaps, over the turf-pits and rye-field. She sat
there and wept very softly; from time to time when wiping the dew
from the pane, she looked stealthily over towards Mogens. He sat bowed
forward, his traveling-cloak was open, his hat lay and rocked on the
front seat; his hands he held in front of his face. All the things he
had to thin