"Seventy years of age, and seventeen stone in weight!" she replied gaily. "No, no, kjaere, I should be too heavy a responsibility. No, I will wait for you in my own little Danish home, made so wickedly comfortable by your kindness; and every day I shall say, 'My Clifford is finding his way into the sunlight again.'"
He stooped down and kissed her kind old hand.
"If I could only tell you my inmost thoughts; but I cannot," he said sadly.
"You never could unfold yourself, dear one," she answered. "You know I always had to guess at what was going on within your mind, and always guessed wrong, of course, and therefore could not help you. I am sure there can be no mental or physical suffering so great as reluctant repression of the thoughts within us."
"Knutty," he said, after a pause, "do you believe that minds can reach each other in dreams?"
"I don't know, kjaere," she said. "I have never reached any one's mind, either in a dream or out of one. In the years gone by, I prided myself on doing so, and then found out that I was mistaken. My present belief is that no one mind can ever reach another in reality, and that each human being speaks and understands only one language—his own language—and every one else's language is what you English people call a 'damned foreign tongue.' Excuse me, dear one, my words may not be academic, but they are supposed to be philosophic. And that reminds me that, in my opinion, you have been a true philosopher, Clifford."
"How so, Knutty?" he said.
"You have asked very little of any one," she answered, "and you have made a successful fight with bitterness. That is what I call true philosophy."
He shook his head in deprecation of her praise, and after another pause he said: