* * *

(Eight days later.)

I copy in this letter to you the following lines from a letter
to another:--

"It is not true that love is for every one the portal to life.
Perchance it is not so for even half of those who attain _real
life_.

"There are many whose lives are ruined by the loss of love, or
by sacrificing everything to love. With some of them, perhaps,
it could not have been otherwise (people are so different,
circumstances excuse so much); but those whose existences I have
seen thus blighted could unconditionally have gained the mastery
over self and in the effort acquired a new power. Encouraged,
however, by a class of literature and art whose
short-sightedness proceeds from a maimed will, they neglected
all attempts at gaining strength."

CHAPTER XI.

Magnhild and Roennaug came arm in arm out of the wood where Roennaug had
finally been obliged to seek her friend, where so many confidences had
been made, so much discussed and considered. They emerged into the open
plain. How blue the haze about the mountains! And this was the frame for
the pine forest, the surrounding heather, and the plain with Miss Roland
and the child. The latter were sitting on blue and red rugs near the
carriage. From this foreground the mother's eye wandered away more
musingly than ever, and gained even stronger impressions of outline,
light, color.

"The summer travels in Norway! The summer travels in Norway!" she kept
saying to herself.

From the way in which she uttered these words it might be surmised that
in the entire English vocabulary there was nothing which admitted of
being repeated with such varied shades of meaning.

The two friends took a long ramble. Magnhild had become a new being to
Roennaug, her individuality enriched, her countenance illumined and thus
transformed. For nearly five years Magnhild had been secretly brooding
over her lost vocation, and her lost love, those two sisters that had
lived and died together. At length she had opened her heart to another;
thus something had been accomplished.

The horses were now hitched to the carriage, and the party drove on. The
noonday repose of nature was not disturbed by so much as the rumbling of
the wheels, for the carriage wound its way slowly over the mountain
slopes.

At the next post-station the following lines were found in the
register:--

"There met us croaki