“Thanks for the promise! I know many who will be sorry to-day they ever drove you to a party.”
Little pleased was the haughty beauty when she entered the ball-room and looked over the guests gathered there.
First of all she saw the little, bald Dahlberg beside the tall, slender, golden-haired Gösta Berling. She wished she could have driven them both out of the room.
Her fiancé came to ask her to dance, but she received him with crushing astonishment.
“Are you going to dance? You never do!”
And the girls came to wish her joy.
“Don’t give yourselves the trouble, girls. You don’t suppose that any one could be in love with old Dahlberg. But he is rich, and I am rich, therefore we go well together.”
The old ladies went up to her, pressed her white hand, and spoke of life’s greatest happiness.
“Congratulate the minister’s wife,” she said. “She is gladder about it than I.”
But there stood Gösta Berling, the gay cavalier, greeted with joy for his cheerful smile and his pleasant words, which sifted gold-dust over life’s gray web. Never before had she seen him as he was that night. He was no outcast, no homeless jester; no, a king among men, a born king.