ge! Yes, one was certainly Frans!

Alma ran down to the veranda. "Dear, dear Frans! I am so glad to see
you!" she exclaimed, as she put her arm around him; and so they
followed their father into the house.

"Thank you, sister!" he answered, with a quivering lip. He could say
no more.

The colonel went into the library and closed the door, and Frans and
his sister were left together. They went back to the veranda and sat
down side by side, Frans still struggling to gain self-command.

"Dear brother," began Alma, "I am so sorry I have been a cross,
disagreeable sister to you. I mean to be better. I shall try, and you
must forgive me if I fail, and am cross to you sometimes."

"Don't speak so, sister," said Frans, interrupting her. "You do not
know what you have been to me. You have kept me from much that is
wrong. When I have been with the boys, and have been tempted to speak
and do as some of them did, I have thought of you. 'What would Alma
say to such talk and such doings?' would come into my mind and help me
to resist temptation. I have thought of you as something higher,
holier, purer than myself. And such a good scholar, too! I have
always been proud of my sister. You found fault with me, of course. I
deserved it, poor, thoughtless fellow that I have been. I cannot be
like you, Alma, but I am really going to try to be better. I have done
with idle ways and bad companions. I did not know what Knut really was
until we came to be constantly together, and then, bad as I was, I
thanked God that I had had such a father and such a sister and such a
home. It is only God's mercy that has saved me from a prison. I had
no way to prove my innocence. What I have suffered you can understand,
but I deserved it all. I have been doing badly all the term. I tried
to make it up at the last. All went well with me in the morning, but
in the afternoon I was so worn out and so tired and dull that I could
not command myself to say what I really knew. Of course I made a
miserable failure. I was afraid to meet my father and ashamed to see
your face when I had come out so badly. I did the worst thing I could
do. I added wrong to wrong, not thinking of all the worry and trouble
I was making. I was quite desperate when I met Knut, and he proposed
that we should go off together. I caught at the plan.--Listen. When I
was hanging, clinging to the boat, in that deep water, so far from the
shore, my whole life ca