When he came the next day, he found me in wild delirium.  My fancy overflowed, like a river from which all dams are removed, with a stream of the wildest conceptions.  It seemed to me that dreadful forms danced and nodded round the bed, and among them one with a long letter of condemnation, with a seal under it, and that Anne Kvaen was there, rolling glittering eyes, while now and again Susanna looked at me with a glance full of pain, as if it were not in her power to hinder my perdition.

From what I learned afterwards, the doctor at first thought it was a nervous fever, but from certain symptoms and the nature of my ravings, concerning which Anne Kvaen, who probably had her own thoughts on the subject, thought it necessary to inform him, he quite changed his opinion.  He had attended my poor mother in her mental illness, and now found the same fancy about the lady and the rose, and the same dread of evil spirits in me the son.

* * * * *

Three weeks later I was quite well again, though pale and exhausted by the long nervous paroxysms.  The whole millstone weight of sin was, as it were, gone from my bosom, and I went to the altar without the smallest scruple.

And I felt quite a dignified person when, on the following Sunday, I went on a confirmation visit to the parsonage in my black dress-coat.  On this occasion Susanna sat—­perhaps a little on show on my account—­like a grown-up lady at her own work-table in the window-seat.  When her mother went out of the room to fetch red-currant wine and cakes, I, at a sign from her, had hastily to look at her precious work-table with all the drawers, both those above and those that appeared below when she pushed the upper drawers away.  In one of these last, which she opened with an arch look, but shut again like lightning as her mother came in, lay the brass ring with glass stones in it that I had once given her, and I recognised two or three old scraps of letters dating from the time when we were children.

When I went away it was with a beating heart, for I had unexpectedly an interview in which Susanna’s true feeling had been revealed to me more clearly than it could have been by any verbal assurance.

It struck me that something must lately have happened at home, for the curt, cold way in which my father used to treat me was wonderfully changed.  For instance, he made me a present of a double-barrelled gun in a sealskin case, and a watch, and he proposed that during the days before my going away Jens and the four-oared boat should be at my disposal as often as I wished to go out shooting or fishing.

I understood what had happened when the doctor one day made his appearance, and asked me to go up with him to my room.

The broadly-built, bald, little doctor, in his homespun coat, and steel-rimmed spectacles on his snub-nose, was one of the hardy people of our fjord districts who glory in going out in all kinds of weather.  You always saw him in the best of spirits when he had just been out in stormy weather.  He was a decided and clear-headed man, whose manner involuntarily inspired confidence, and he also possessed a warmth and open-heartedness that made him, when he chose, very winning.  He was the doctor both at our house and the parsonage, and a confidential friend of both families.