Tharald paused in his walk, and stood long, measuring his antagonist with a look of slow, pondering defiance. Then he tossed his head back with a grim laugh, walked toward a carved oaken press in a corner, took out a ponderous Bible, and flung it down on the table.
"I am beginning to see through your game," he said gruffly. "Here is the family record. Look into it at your leisure. And if you are right, let me know. But don't you tell me that that scare about the glacier wasn't all humbug. If it is your right of entail you want to look up, I sha'n't stand in your way."
Thereupon he stalked out, slamming the door behind him; the walls shook, and the windows shivered in their frames.
A vast sheet of gauzy cloud was slowly spreading over the western expanse of the sky. Through its silvery meshes the full moon looked down upon the glacier with a grave unconcern. Drifts of cold white mist hovered here and there over the surface of the ice, rising out of the deep blue hollows, catching for an instant the moonbeams, and again gliding away into the shadow of some far-looming peak.
On the little winding path at the end of the glacier stood Maurice, looking anxiously down toward the valley. Presently a pale speck of color was seen moving in the fog, and on closer inspection proved to be that scarlet bodice which in Norway constitutes the middle portion of a girl's figure. A minute more, and the bodice was surmounted by a fair, girlish face, which looked ravishingly fresh and tangible in its misty setting. The lower portions, partly owing to their neutral coloring and in part to the density of the fog, were but vaguely suggested.
"I have been waiting for you nearly half an hour, down at the river-brink," called out a voice from below, and its clear, mellow ring seemed suddenly to lighten the heavy atmosphere. "I really thought you had forgotten me."
"Forgotten you?" cried Maurice, making a very unscientific leap down in the direction of the voice "When did I ever forget you, you ungrateful thing?"
"Aha!" responded Elsie, laughing, for of course the voice as well as the bodice was hers. "Now didn't you say the edge of the glacier?"
"Yes, but I didn't say the lower edge. If you had at all been gifted with the intuition proverbially attributed to young ladies in your situation, you would have known that I meant the western edge—in fact here, and nowhere else."
"Even though you didn't say it?"