ers, his gait, the tone of his voice,
all seemed to irritate and humiliate Peer. Never mind--just let him
wait!

Days passed, and weeks. Peer soon found another object to work for
than getting the better of Ferdinand Holm. Louise's dresses hung still
untouched in his room, her shoes stood under the bed; it still seemed
to him that some day she must open the door and walk in. And when he
lay there alone at night, the riddle was always with him: Where is she
now?--why should she have died?--would he never meet her again? He saw
her always as she had stood that day playing to the sick folks in the
hospital ward. But now she was dressed in white. And it seemed quite
natural now that she had wings. He heard her music too--it cradled and
rocked him. And all this came to be a little world apart, where he could
take refuge for Sunday peace and devotion. It had nothing to do with
faith or religion, but it was there. And sometimes in the midst of
his work in the daytime he would divine, as in a quite separate
consciousness, the tones of a fiddle-bow drawn across the strings, like
reddish waves coming to him from far off, filling him with harmony, till
he smiled without knowing it.

Often, though, a sort of hunger would come upon him to let his being
unfold in a great wide wave of organ music in the church. But to church
he never went any more. He would stride by a church door with a kind of
defiance. It might indeed be an Almighty Will that had taken Louise from
him, but if so he did not mean to give thanks to such a Will or bow
down before it. It was as though he had in view a coming reckoning--his
reckoning with something far out in eternity--and he must see to it that
when that time came he could feel free--free.

On Sunday mornings, when the church bells began to ring, he would
turn hastily to his books, as if to find peace in them.
Knowledge--knowledge--could it stay his hunger for the music of the
hymn? When he had first started work at the shops, he had often and
often stood wide-eyed before some miracle--now he was gathering the
power to work miracles himself. And so he read and read, and drank in
all that he could draw from teacher or book, and thought and thought
things out for himself. Fixed lessons and set tasks were all well
enough, but Peer was for ever looking farther; for him there were
questions and more questions, riddles and new riddles--always new,
always farther and farther on, towards the unknown. He had