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, a foreboding of unhappiness, in the background of my mind--although dissipated in the brighter summer-time of my companionship with Susanna--was therefore no sin, no burden of crime, no dark mysterious exception in me from every other natural order of things, but only a disease, actually only a disease, which was to be treated with a correspondingly natural treatment! I had never thought that any one could be as glad to hear that he was mad, or at any rate that there was danger of his becoming so, as over-good news; but now I know that such a thing can be. I prayed now, as it seemed for the first time in my life, really, confidently, and trustfully to God, to whom I stood in the same relation as every one else, or, if there were any difference, even nearer, because I was a poor, sick creature. I felt as if God's sun had shone out upon me after a long, weary, rainy day. I prayed for myself, for Susanna, for my father; and in the enjoyment of this new condition of security I went on to pray first for every single person at home, then for those at the parsonage, then for the clerk, and at last, for want of others, as we do in church, for "all who are sick and sorrowful," among whom, with a glad heart, I now classed myself. CHAPTER VI _AT THE CLERK'S_ It was only two days before I was to start for Trondenaes in a vessel which was lying ready to go north. While I was irresolutely considering every possible means of getting a last talk with Susanna before I started, there came a message from the clerk to say that I must be sure to come out to him the next day at eleven o'clock precisely; he would not be at home later. The same morning that the message came Susanna had been at the clerk's. Without saying a word, she sat down at the table with her face buried in her arms. When the alarmed clerk pressed the "child of his heart"--as he called her in his concern--for an explanation, she at length lifted up a tear-stained face to him, and said she was crying because she was so very, very unhappy. "But why, dear Susanna?" "Because," burst suddenly on his ear, "I love David, and he loves me, and we are engaged; but no one must know it except you--and you will not betray us?" With this last question she threw herself weeping upon the neck of the stunned and bewildered clerk, who in his heart was already won over, long before he had made out what it was he was undertaking. He replaced Susanna in
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