During the days immediately before the confirmation my distress rose to fever height, several times I was scarcely in my right mind, and felt dreadfully unhappy.  It seemed to me at last that I was actually throwing away my eternal happiness for Susanna’s sake.  At night I started up from terrifying dreams, in which I saw myself kneeling at the altar with Susanna beside me—­she looking so unsuspecting, so supernaturally beautiful, while the minister stood with a face of thunder, as if he knew that a soul would now be destroyed, and that, in the Communion, he was carrying out God’s vengeance.  Another night I awoke with a fancy that a scornful laugh came from under the bed, and with a conviction that the Evil One lurked there, curled up like a great snake.  I hid myself with a beating heart under the down quilt, until I heard people moving in the yard below in the morning, and then I ventured to fly from the room.

It was Confirmation Day.

I stood at the glass that morning, before church-time, dressing myself in my new clothes, in the “blue room,” the room in which my mother had been confined during the many years she was ill.  I could see, through the small-paned windows, boat after boat full of nicely-dressed confirmation candidates, with their parents in holiday costume, rowing, in the bright autumn day, across the bay, and landing, some at our pier, others at the parsonage landing-place.

An impression of solemnity suddenly filled me with despair; I thought of how all these people would come into God’s kingdom as easily as they were now rowing into the sunny bay this quiet Sunday morning, while I alone stood without hope of salvation.  I saw all at once that in my sad, spiritually dark home, I had always, from childhood upwards, really had a feeling in my inmost heart that happiness and blessedness were not meant for me, and that all the happiness and joy I hitherto had was really only borrowed sunshine from the parsonage.  And with the sin I was carrying, I could only have Susanna as a loan until I died, when we should have to part, and I must go back to the evil powers of unhappiness, which, from my earliest hour here at home, had taken possession of me.

I leant against the wall and cried.

As I was about to continue my dressing, and turned to the glass, it was without terror, even with a certain tranquillity, that my gaze fell on the old vision of my childhood, the lady with the rose whom I saw standing behind me in the open chamber-door, pale and sorrowful, looking at me, until she suddenly vanished.

The church bells were ringing and the people were streaming towards the church.  To-day Anne Kvaen and all the house servants were also among the churchgoers.  Father went with me, and bowed respectfully to the minister when they met at the entrance.

The order in which we confirmation candidates were to stand in church had been decided the Monday before.  I was to stand first on the boys’ side, Susanna first on the girls’ side.