approached the wing of the house which Mrs. Astrid inhabited, she became
calmer. She looked up to her window, and saw there her noble but gloomy
profile. It was bent down, and her head seemed as it were depressed by
dark thoughts. At this sight, Susanna forgot all her own ill humour.
"Oh!" sighed she, "if I could only make her happier!"

This was Susanna's daily subject of thought, but it became to her every
day a darker riddle. Mrs. Astrid appeared to be indifferent to
everything around her here. Never did she give an order about anything
in the house, but let Susanna scold there and govern just as she would.
Susanna took all the trouble she could to provide the table of her
mistress with everything good and delicious which lay in her power; but
to her despair the lady ate next to nothing, and never appeared to
notice whether it was prepared well or ill.

Now before Susanna went into the house, she gathered several of the most
beautiful flowers which the autumn frost had spared, made a nosegay of
them, and with these in her hand stept softly into Mrs. Astrid's room.

"Bowed with grief," is the expression which describes Mrs. Astrid's
whole being. The sickly paleness of her noble countenance, the depressed
seldom-raised eyelids, the inanimate languor of her movements, the
gloomy indifference in which her soul seemed to be wrapped,--like her
body in its black mourning habiliments, when she sate for hours in her
easy-chair, often without occupation, the head bowed down upon the
breast; all this indicated a soul which was severely fettered by long
suffering.

Suffering in the north has its own peculiar character. In the south it
burns and consumes. In the north it kills slowly; it freezes, it
petrifies by degrees. This has been acknowledged for untold ages, when
our forefathers sought for images of that which they felt to be the most
terrible in life; thus originated the fable of the subterranean dwelling
of Hela, of the terrors of the shore of corpses--in one word, the "Hell
of the North, with its infinite, treeless wildernesses; with cold,
darkness, mist, clammy rivers, chill, distilling poison, cities
resembling clouds filled with rain, feetless hobgoblins," and so on.

In the Grecian Tartarian dance of the Furies there is life and wild
strength, there is in its madness a certain intoxication which deprives
it of its feeling of deep misery. The heart revolts not so much from
these pictures of terror, as from the co