"But——" began that inner voice.
"I only asked to work and be at peace," he answered again sternly.
Then he went to the table by the door and looked at his letters. One was from Knutty.
"No," he said, as he fingered it; "Knutty asks an impossibility of me. She does not know all—she does not see all around. Katharine Frensham has shown by her silence that...."
He opened Knutty's letter. There was one enclosed, addressed in a gallant handwriting: "Clifford Thornton, Esq., Solli Gaard, Gudbrandsdal, Norway." It was old and stained. On a slip of paper Knutty had written: "Solli has this moment sent this letter to me. He says it must have been to many Sollis all over the Gudbrandsdal, until the Norwegian post-office got tired. You see there is no district mentioned, and Solli is as common as Smith. Ragnhild Solli found it reposing in the Otta post-office, waiting, no doubt, for next year's tourists."
Clifford's hands trembled. A great pain had seized his beating heart. He sank down into his chair, broke open the letter, and read with dim eyes the following lines:—
[CHAPTER IV.]
"Judge you, judge you. Oh, my dearest, my dearest, if I could have told you what was in my heart when you said those words to me, up at Peer Gynt's stue, then I should not be writing this letter to you, though I want to write it, want to write down everything that is in my heart, everything that sprang into flower at the moment when I first saw you. For I love you, and I am holding out my arms to you, have been holding them out ever since I first saw you. Does it seem overbold that I say this to you? Why should not a woman say it? Anyway, I say it, and am not ashamed. I love you, and I am waiting for you. I have loved you with tears in my heart from the very beginning, grieving over you as over one whom I had known all my life, and with whom I had the right to sympathise with all the sympathy of my best nature.
"You know, dearest, I had been away from England for three years. You remember that I told you I went away when my brother married. I can never describe to you how I had dreaded my home-coming. There was nothing and no one to come back for. Twice I turned back. I had not the courage to face the loneliness which, with my mind's eyes, I saw stretched before me like some desolate plain. But one day I felt a sudden irresistible impulse to return. When I saw you that evening, I knew that I had returned to find you. And I knew that in some strange way you recognised me and claimed me in your heart of hearts, as I claimed you. From that moment my life changed.
"Is it not wonderful, my belovèd, how one rises up and goes forth to meet love: how time and space become annihilated, and all barriers of mind and circumstance are swept away as by an avalanche? Yes, from that moment my life changed, and yours changed too. But I knew that I had to wait. I knew that you had to free yourself in your own way from the memories which were encompassing you. And all the time I was yearning to say to you: 'Do not fight with the past. Do not try to push the past on one side. It can never be forgotten, never be ignored. But something better can be done with it. It can be faced, understood, and then gathered up with the present and the future. Let me help you to do it. I will gather it up with a tenderness never dreamed of before in the whole world of love.'