“After that few words were needed. It went without saying that some day she should be his wife. It was not a love of kisses and caresses. He hardly dared come near her. She was as sensitive as a fragile flower. But her brown eyes were sometimes raised from the ground to seek his. On moonlit evenings, when they sat on the veranda, she would creep close to him, and then he would kiss her hair without her noticing it.
“But you understand that his sin was in his forgetting both the past and the future. That he was poor and humble he could forget; but he ought always to have remembered that a day must come when in her soul love would rise against love, earth against heaven, when she would be obliged to choose between him and the glorious Lord of the kingdom of the thousand years. And she was not one who could endure such a struggle.
“A summer went by, an autumn, a winter. When the spring came, and the ice melted, Ebba Dohna fell ill. It was thawing in the valleys; there were streams down all the hills, the ice was unsafe, the roads almost impassable both for sledge and cart.
“Countess Dohna wanted to get a doctor from Karlstad; there was none nearer. But she commanded in vain. She could not, either with prayers or threats, induce a servant to go. She threw herself on her knees before the coachman, but he refused. She went into hysterics of grief over her daughter—she was always immoderate, in sorrow as in joy, Countess Märta.
“Ebba Dohna lay ill with pneumonia, and her life was in danger; but no doctor could be got.
“Then the tutor drove to Karlstad. To take that journey in the condition the roads were in was to play with his life; but he did it. It took him over bending ice and break-neck freshets. Sometimes he had to cut steps for the horse in the ice, sometimes drag him out of the deep clay in the road. It was said that the doctor refused to go with him, and that he, with pistol in hand, forced him to set out.
“When he came back the countess was ready to throw herself at his feet. ‘Take everything!’ she said. ‘Say what you want, what you desire,—my daughter, my lands, my money!’
“‘Your daughter,’ answered the tutor.”
Anna Stjärnhök suddenly stops.
“Well, what then, what then?” asks Countess Elizabeth.