d the thought of him, and never
dreamed that she could ever love another! Until at last he came--her
husband. How good and honest and generous he had been--willing to take
her, a poor cottage girl, and make her mistress of the place. And how
she herself had felt so weak, so bitterly in need of friendship and
support, until at last she thought she really loved him.

No, she could not tell him that--it would have been wrong every
way--as if she had a different explanation for each.

And to Olof she said only: "I loved him, it is true. But our first
child--you saw yourself. It's past understanding. It must have been
that I could not even then forget--that first winter. I can find no
other way...."

Olof sat helplessly, as in face of an inexplicable riddle.

Then she went on, speaking now to God, while Olof was pondering still.

"You know ... you know it all! I thought I had freed myself from him,
but it was not so. My heart was given to him, and love had marked it
with his picture, so that life had no other form for me. And then,
when I loved again, and our first-born lay beneath my heart.... All
that was in my thoughts that, time ... and after, when the child was
to be born ... the struggle in my mind ... how I did not always wish
myself it should be otherwise--dearly as I have paid for it since...."

And at last, in a whisper, she spoke to her husband:

"It was terrible--terrible. For your sake, because you had been so
good--you, the only one I love. It was as if I were faithless to you,
and yet I know my heart was true. I would have borne the secret
alone, that is why I have never spoken of it to you before. But now I
must--and it hurts me that any should have known it before."

Olof was waiting--she could see it in his eyes.

"You know, I need not tell you how it has made me suffer," she said,
turning towards him. "And when the second time came, and I was again
to be a mother, I wept and prayed in secret--and my prayer was heard.
It was a girl--and her father's very image. And after that I felt
safe, and calm again...."

She marked how Olof sighed, how the icy look seemed to melt from his
eyes.

And she herself felt an unspeakable tenderness, a longing to open
her heart to him. Of all she had thought of in those years of
loneliness--life and fate and love.... Had he too, perhaps, thought of
such things? And what had he come to in the end? She herself felt now
that when two human beings have once been broug