erself disconsolately by the window with
her cheek upon her hand, and gaze wistfully out over the harbour. She
longed so for cold fresh air, and would end by throwing up the window
and stretching herself with her heated face as far out of it as she
possibly could, till Madam Beck would come in, and in a stern voice call
her back. Madam Beck, in her irritation, used to say that it was almost
as if they had taken a wild thing into the house.

Carl Beck understood very well what she was going through, and would
occasionally throw her an encouraging look; but Elizabeth affected
always not to understand it. On one occasion, however, when she was
corrected in his presence, she hurriedly left the room, and throwing
herself on her bed, lay there and sobbed as if her heart would break.

She had been trusted one afternoon, shortly after, to bring in the
tea-tray, on which, without thinking what she was doing, she had placed
the chafing-dish with the boiling teakettle. It fell as she was carrying
it in; but although its hot side and the boiling water burnt and scalded
her arm and hand, she carried the tray quite quietly out again without
allowing a muscle of her face to change--she was not going to be
corrected before him again.

Madam Beck herself bound up her hand in the kitchen, where she stood
white with pain; while Carl, who had been sitting on the sofa, and had
seen how the whole thing happened, forgetting his self-command, had
jumped up in great excitement, and had shown such uncommon sympathy that
his sister Mina, afterwards, when they were alone in the room together,
said, with a look that was more searching than the joking words seemed
to require, "It is not possible you are fond of the girl, Carl?"

"No fear, Mina," he answered quickly, in the same tone, chucking her
under the chin as he spoke. "There are as handsome girls as her in
Arendal; but you can see as well as I can that she is a girl in a
hundred. That business with the tea-tray is what very few others would
have been capable of; and we mustn't forget that if it had not been for
her--"

"Oh yes," rejoined Mina, with a toss of her head, a little tired of the
eternal repetition of this stock observation. "She didn't know all the
same that it was papa who was out there."

It was a game of hypocrisy, thought out with no inconsiderable subtlety,
that the handsome lieutenant was carrying on in this matter: under his
apparently so entirely frank sailor-bearing t