“Suppose this should be the last party we give, Merle.”
“Peer, what makes you say that?”
“Oh, nothing—only I have a sort of feeling, as if something had just ended and something new was to begin. I feel like it, somehow. But I wanted to thank you, too, for all the happy times we’ve had.”
“But Peer—what—” She got no farther, for Peer had already left her and joined a group of guests, where he was soon as gay as the rest.
Then came the day when the two visitors were to leave. Their birthday gift to the young gentleman so lately christened Lorentz Uthoug stood in the drawing-room; it was a bust in red granite, the height of a man, of the Sun-god Re Hormachis, brought with them by the godfathers from Alexandria. And now it sat in the drawing-room between palms in pots, pressing its elbows against its sides and gazing with great dead eyes out into endless space.
Peer stood on the quay waving farewell to his old comrades as the steamer ploughed through the water, drawing after it a fan-shaped trail of little waves.
And when he came home, he walked about the place, looking at farms and woods, at Merle and the children, with eyes that seemed to her strange and new.
Next night he stayed up once more alone, pacing to and fro in the great hall, and looking out of the windows into the dark.
Was he ravelling out his life into golden threads that vanished and were forgotten?
Was he content to be fuel instead of light?