d seen his
wife,--the treasured darling of his days, suffering,--dying, inch by
inch, year by year, with all her radiant beauty withered,--and he had
never known her destroyer! Her fall from the edge of the chasm had been
deemed by them both an accident, and yet--this wretched Lovisa
Elsland--mad with misplaced, disappointed passion, jealousy, and
revenge,--had lived on to the extreme of life, triumphant and
unsuspected.

"I swear the gods have played me false in this!" he muttered, lifting
his eyes in a sort of fierce appeal to the motionless pinetops stiff
with frost. The mystery of the old hag's hatred of his daughter was now
made clear--she resembled her mother too closely to escape Lovisa's
malice. He remembered the curse she had called down upon the innocent
girl,--how it was she who had untiringly spread abroad the report among
the superstitious people of the place, that Thelma was a witch whose
presence was a blight upon the land,--how she had decoyed her into the
power of Mr. Dyceworthy--all was plain--and, notwithstanding her
deliberate wickedness, she had lived her life without punishment! This
was what made Gueldmar's blood burn, and pulses thrill. He could not
understand why the Higher Powers had permitted this error of justice,
and, like many of his daring ancestors, he was ready to fling defiance
in the very face of Odin, and demand--"Why,--O thou drowsy god, nodding
over thy wine-cups,--why didst thou do this thing?"

Utter fearlessness,--bodily and spiritual,--fearlessness of past,
present, or future, life or death,--was Gueldmar's creed. The true Norse
warrior spirit was in him--had he been told, on heavenly authority, that
the lowest range of the "Nastrond" or Scandinavian Hell, awaited him, he
would have accepted his fate with unflinching firmness. The
indestructibility of the soul, and the certainty that it must outlive
even centuries of torture, and triumph gloriously in the end, was the
core of the faith he professed. As he glanced upwards, the frozen
tree-tops, till then rigidly erect, swayed slightly from side to side
with a crackling sound--but he paid no heed to this slight warning of a
fresh attack from the combative storm that was gathering together and
renewing its scattered forces. He began to think of his daughter, and
the grave lines on his face relaxed and softened.

"'Tis all fair sailing for the child," he mused. "For that I should be
grateful! The world has been made a soft nest f