"But tell me—tell me all about it," exclaimed Holm eagerly.
"Mr. Holm, you know the darkest part of all my life; it is only fair that you should know the rest. I've nothing to be ashamed of, for after all I have managed to earn a livelihood for myself and Betty. I was seventeen when I left home, and they said I was quite good-looking——"
"You're equal to anything on the market now, as we say in business——"
"Well, I came straight from the wilds of the Nordland to Christiania, and they called me 'the Nordland sun.' I was the most sought after at all the dances, and perhaps one of the most brilliant, for I came to the gay life of the capital with the freshness of a novice. It was not long before I became engaged to a young writer—a poet, he was——"
"The devil you did! Beg pardon, I'm sure, but to tell the truth I've no faith in that sort of people, as Banker Hermansen would say."
"We were both of us young and inexperienced; he dreamed of gaining world-wide fame by his pen, and I used to weep over his passionate love poems. I was eighteen and he twenty-two, and I promised to follow him to the end of the world, for better or worse.
"Then one fine day we landed in Paris, without caring a jot for our people, our friends, or our own country. We were married there at the Swedish Church, and there I was, a poet's wife, with my people at home trying to forget the black sheep of the family.
"A few years passed. But every day saw the breaking of one of the golden threads in our web of illusion, and when Betty was born we were in desperate straits.
"Poor old Thor, he used to sit up late at night writing stuff for the papers at home, all about magnificent functions he'd never been to at all, and warming his frozen fingers over a few bits of coal in the stove."
"And he might have made quite a decent living in an office," put in Holm sympathetically.