“...”  But the other voice was lost in a rush of foaming waters.

* * * * *

He took the girl’s hand in his, and spoke warmly, with beautiful words.

Her fair brow darkened under a cloud—­so dark seemed any cloud there that for a moment he wished he had not spoken.

“I never thought you could doubt me,” she murmured, almost in tears.  “Or ask—­or ask for that!”

“Oh, my love,” he thought.  “If you only knew!  Just one word, and then I can tell you all—­and we shall be doubly happy after.”

So he thought, but he did not speak.  And now he could think of nothing but the moment when he could tell her that it was but a question in all innocence—­a trial of her love.

“It is because I love you as I do,” she said, “that I could not do it.  We have been so happy—­but that would be something strange between us.  And now that you are going away....”  She stopped, and the two looked at each other sorrowfully.  It was as if already something strange had crept between them, as if they had hurt each other unwittingly, and suffered at the thought.

* * * * *

Day by day their parting drew nearer, the sun was veiled in a dreary mist.

Then one day she came to him, strangely moved, and clung to him, slight and yielding as the drooping curtains of the birch, swayed by the wind.  Clung to him, threw her arms warmly round his neck, and looked into his eyes with a new light in her own.

“What—­what is it?” he asked, with emotion, hovering between fear and a strange delight.

“Olof—­I am ...  I can say it now....”

A tumult of joy rose up in him at her words.  He clasped her to him in a fervent embrace, and opened his lips to tell her the secret at last.  But his heart beat all too violently, a hand seemed clutching his throat, and he could not utter a word, but crushed her closer to him, and pressed his lips to hers.

Drawn two ways, he seemed, and now but one; all thought of the other vanished utterly.  His breast was almost bursting with a desperate regret; he could not speak, and would not even if he could.

And then, as he felt the pressure of her embrace return his own, regret was drowned in an ecstasy of surrender.

“I love you,” she whispered, “as only your mother ever could!”

Olof turned cold.  It was as if a stranger had surprised them in an intimate caress.

“Olof,” she murmured, with an unspeakable tenderness in her eyes.  And as if some great thing had suddenly come into her mind she went on:  “You have never told me about your mother....  No, don’t tell me now; I know it all myself.  She is tall like you, and stately, and upright still as ever.  And she has just the same bright eyes, and little hollows at the temples, like you have.  And she wears a dark striped apron, with a little pocket at the side, where she keeps her knitting, and takes it out now and then to work at as she goes.”