Nevertheless Madame Lechertier’s quick eyes noted at once the change in her favorite.
“You are not well, chérie,” she said, “your face looks worn. Why, my dear, I can actually see lines in your forehead. At your age that is inexcusable.”
Sigrid laughed.
“I have a bad habit of wrinkling it up when I am worried about anything,” she said. “To-day, perhaps, I am a little tired. It is so hot and sultry, and besides I am anxious about Frithiof, it is a trying time for him.”
“Yes, this heat is trying to the strongest,” said Madame Lechertier, fanning herself. “Swanhild, my angel, there are some new bonbons in that box, help yourself.”
This afternoon it happened to be a children’s class, and Madame Lechertier invariably regaled them in the intervals of rest with the most delicious French sweetmeats. It was a pretty sight to see the groups of little ones, and Swanhild in her dainty Norwegian costume, handing the bonbons to each in turn. Sigrid always liked to watch this part of the performance, and perhaps the most comforting thought to her just then was, that as far as Swanhild was concerned, the new life, in spite of its restrictions and economies, seemed to answer so well. The child was never happier than when hard at work at the academy; even on this hot summer day she never complained; and in truth the afternoons just brought the right amount of variety into what would otherwise have been a very monotonous life.
“Sigrid,” said the little girl, as they walked home together, “is it true what you said to Madame Lechertier about Frithiof feeling the heat? Is it really that which has made him so grave the last few days?”
“It is partly that,” replied Sigrid. “But he has a good deal to trouble him that you are too young to understand, things that will not bear talking about. You must try to make it bright and cheerful at home.”
Swanhild sighed. It was not so easy to be bright and cheerful all by one’s self, and of late Frithiof and Sigrid had been—as she expressed it in the quaint Norse idiom—silent as lighted candles. People talk a great deal about the happy freedom from care which children can enjoy, but as a matter of fact many a child feels the exact state of the home atmosphere, and puzzles its head over the unknown troubles which are grieving the elders, often magnifying trifles into most alarming and menacing sources of danger. But Frithiof never guessed either little Swanhild’s perplexities, or Sigrid’s trouble; when he returned all seemed to him natural and homelike; and perhaps it was as much with the desire to be still with them as from any recollection of Donati’s words, that on the following Sunday he set off with them to the service held during the summer evenings at Westminster Abbey.
What impression the beautiful service made on him Sigrid could not tell, but the sermon was unluckily the very last he ought to have heard. The learned Oxford professor who preached to the great throng of people that night could have understood very little how his words would affect many of his hearers; he preached as a pessimist, he drew a miserable picture of the iniquity and injustice of the world, all things were going wrong, the times were out of joint, but he suggested no remedy, he did not even indicate that there was another side to the picture. The congregation dispersed. In profound depression, Frithiof walked down the nave, and passed out into the cool evening air. Miserable as life had seemed to him before, it now seemed doubly miserable, it was all a great wretched problem to which there was no solution, a purposeless whirl of buying and selling, a selfish struggle for existence. They walked past the Aquarium, the dingy side streets looked unlovely enough on that summer night, and the dreary words he had heard haunted him persistently, harmonizing only too well with the cui bono that at all times was apt to suggest itself to his mind. A wretched, clouded life in a miserable world, misfortunes which he had never deserved eternally dogging his steps, his own case merely one of a million similar or worse cases. Where was the use of it all?