gyman, a
noble, proud, self-centred nature, finely strung to the inmost fibre of
her being. Then we have a woman of the other sort, clinging,
abnormally sensitive, a child when the years of childhood are over, and
made the victim of a shocking child-marriage to a crippled old man. She
it is whom the physician loves, and persuades to a legal dissolution of
her immoral union. After some years, he makes her his wife, and their
happiness would be complete were it not for the social and religious
prejudice aroused. The clergyman, whom years of service in the state
church have hardened into bigotry, is officially, as it were, compelled
to condemn the friend of his boyhood, and even the sister, for a time
grown untrue to her own generous nature, shares in the estrangement.
In vain does the physician seek to shelter his wife from the chill of
her environment. She droops, pines away, and finally dies, gracious,
lovable, and even forgiving to the last. Then the death angel comes
close to the clergyman and his wife, hovering over their only child,
and at last the barrier of formalism and prejudice and religious
bigotry is swept away from their minds. Their natural sympathies, long
repressed, resume full sway, and they realize how deeply they, have
sinned toward the dead woman. The sister seeks a reconciliation with
her brother, but he repulses her, and gives her his wife's private
diary to read. In this _journal intime_ she finds the full revelation
of the gentle spirit that has been done to death, and she feels that
the very salvation of her life and soul depend upon winning her
brother's forgiveness. The closing chapter, in which the final
reconciliation occurs, is one of the most wonderful in all fiction; its
pathos is of the deepest and the most moving, and he must be callous of
soul, indeed, who can read it with dry eyes.

If we were to search the whole of Bjoernson's writings for the single
passage which should most completely typify his message to his
fellowmen,--not Norwegians alone, but all mankind,--the choice would
have to rest upon the words spoken from the pulpit by the clergyman of
this novel, on the Sunday following the certainty of his child's
recovery.

"To-day a man spoke from the pulpit of the church about what he had
learned.

"Namely, about what first concerns us all.

"One forgets it in his strenuous endeavor, a second in his zeal for
conflict, a third in his backward vision, a fourth in the concei