yet she is only an old Mamsell.

"She has transfigured our dark fate. Blessings on her name!"

The dead joined in, in a thousandfold echo: "Blessings on her name!"

"Sister," whispered Mamsell Fredrika, "can you not forbid them to
make me, poor, sinful being, proud?"

"But, sisters, sisters," continued the voice, "she has turned
against our race with all her great power. At her cry for freedom
and work for all, the old, despised livers on charity have died
out. She has broken down the tyranny that fenced in childhood.
She has stirred young girls towards the wide activity of life. She
has put an end to loneliness, to ignorance, to joylessness. No
unhappy, despised old Mamsells without aim or purpose in life will
ever exist again; none such as we have been."

Again resounded the echo of the shades, merry as a hunting-song in
the wood which is sung by a happy throng of children: "Blessed be
her memory!"

Thereupon the dead swarmed out of the church, and Mamsell Fredrika
wiped away a tear from the corner of her eye.

"I will not go home with you," said her dead sister. "Will you not
stop here now also?"

"I should like to, but I cannot. There is a book which I must make
ready first."

"Well, good-night then, and beware of the knight of the church
road," said her dead sister, and smiled roguishly in her old way.

Then Mamsell Fredrika drove home. All Arsta still slept, and she
went quietly to her room, lay down and slept again.

***

A few hours later she drove to the real early mass. She drove in a
closed carriage, but she let down the window to look at the stars;
it is possible too that she, as of old, was looking for her knight.

And there he was; he sprang forward to the window of the carriage.
He sat his prancing charger magnificently. His scarlet cloak
fluttered in the wind. His pale face was stern, but beautiful.

"Will you be mine?" he whispered.

She was transported in her old heart by the lofty figure with the
waving plumes. She forgot that she needed to live a year yet.

"I am ready," she whispered.

"Then I will come and fetch you in a week at your father's house."

He bent down and kissed her, and then he vanished; she began to
shiver and tremble under Death's kiss.

A little later Mamsell Fredrika sat in the church, in the same
place where she had sat as a child. Here she forgot both the knight
and the ghosts, and sat smiling in quiet delight at the thought of
the revelation of the glo