d.

It might come at any moment, that happy thought. And he tramped round
and round his machine, clenching his fists in desperation because it was
so slow in coming.

The last touch only, the dot upon an i, was wanting. A slight change in
the shape or position of the fingers, or the length of the shears--what
was it he wanted? How could he sleep that night?

He felt that he stood face to face with a difficulty that could have
been easily solved had he come fresh to the work, but that his tortured
brain was too worn out to overcome.

But when an Arab horse is ready to drop with fatigue, then is the time
when it breaks into a gallop.

He could not wait. There were the faces at the window again, staring and
asking: "Not finished yet?" Merle, the children, Uthoug and his wife,
the Bank Manager. And there were his competitors the world over. To-day
he was a length ahead of them, but by to-morrow he might be left behind.
Wait? Rest? No!

It was autumn now, and sleepless nights drove him to a doctor, who
prescribed cold baths, perfect quiet, sleeping draughts, iron and
arsenic. Ah, yes. Peer could swallow all the prescriptions--the one
thing he could not do was rest or sleep.

He would sit late into the night, prostrate with exhaustion, watching
the dying embers of the forge, the steel, the tools. And innumerable
sparks would begin to fly before his eyes, and masses of molten iron to
creep about like living things over walls and floor.--And over by the
forge was something more defined, a misty shape, that grew in size and
clearness and stood at last a bearded, naked demigod, with fire in one
hand and sledgehammer in the other.

"What? Who is that?"

"Man, do you not know me?"

"Who are you, I ask?"

"I have a thing to tell you: it is vain for you to seek for any other
faith than faith in the evolution of the universe. It will do no good to
pray. You may dream yourself away from the steel and the fire, but you
must offer yourself up to them at last. You are bound fast to these
things. Outside them your soul is nothing. God? happiness? yourself?
eternal life for you? All these are nothing. The will of the world rolls
on towards its eternal goal, and the individual is but fuel for the
fire."

Peer would spring up, believing for a moment that someone was really
there. But there was nothing, only the empty air.

Now and again he would go home to Loreng, but everything there seemed to
pass in a mist. He could see t