t dreadful forms danced
and nodded round the bed, and among them one with a long letter of
condemnation, with a seal under it, and that Anne Kvaen was there,
rolling glittering eyes, while now and again Susanna looked at me with a
glance full of pain, as if it were not in her power to hinder my
perdition.

From what I learned afterwards, the doctor at first thought it was a
nervous fever, but from certain symptoms and the nature of my ravings,
concerning which Anne Kvaen, who probably had her own thoughts on the
subject, thought it necessary to inform him, he quite changed his
opinion. He had attended my poor mother in her mental illness, and now
found the same fancy about the lady and the rose, and the same dread of
evil spirits in me the son.

* * * * *

Three weeks later I was quite well again, though pale and exhausted by
the long nervous paroxysms. The whole millstone weight of sin was, as it
were, gone from my bosom, and I went to the altar without the smallest
scruple.

And I felt quite a dignified person when, on the following Sunday, I
went on a confirmation visit to the parsonage in my black dress-coat. On
this occasion Susanna sat--perhaps a little on show on my account--like
a grown-up lady at her own work-table in the window-seat. When her
mother went out of the room to fetch red-currant wine and cakes, I, at a
sign from her, had hastily to look at her precious work-table with all
the drawers, both those above and those that appeared below when she
pushed the upper drawers away. In one of these last, which she opened
with an arch look, but shut again like lightning as her mother came in,
lay the brass ring with glass stones in it that I had once given her,
and I recognised two or three old scraps of letters dating from the time
when we were children.

When I went away it was with a beating heart, for I had unexpectedly an
interview in which Susanna's true feeling had been revealed to me more
clearly than it could have been by any verbal assurance.

It struck me that something must lately have happened at home, for the
curt, cold way in which my father used to treat me was wonderfully
changed. For instance, he made me a present of a double-barrelled gun in
a sealskin case, and a watch, and he proposed that during the days
before my going away Jens and the four-oared boat should be at my
disposal as often as I wished to go out shooting or fishing.

I understood what had