The gates were opened, and the coach rumbled away.  Anders let the horses go gently, for now there was no hurry.  Now and then he stole a glance at the guard by his side; he was still sitting smiling to himself, and letting the wind ruffle his hair.

Anders the post-boy also smiled in his peculiar way.  He began to understand.

The wind followed the coach until the road turned; thereupon it again swept over the plain, and whistled and sighed long and strangely among the dry clusters of heather.  The fox lay at his post; everything was calculated to a nicety; the hare must soon be there.

In the inn Karen had at last reappeared, and the confusion had gradually subsided.  The anxious countryman had got quit of his candle and received his sixty-three oere, and the commercial gentlemen had set to work upon the roast hare.

Madame whined a little, but she never scolded Karen; there was not a person in the world who could scold Karen.

Quietly and without haste Karen again walked to and fro, and the air of peaceful comfort that always followed her once more overspread the snug, half-dark parlour.  But the two fish-buyers, who had had both one and two cognacs with their coffee, were quite taken up with her.  She had got some colour in her cheeks, and wore a little half-hidden gleam of a smile, and when she once happened to raise her eyes, a thrill shot through their whole frames.

But when she felt their eyes following her, she went into the room where the commercial men sat dining, and began to polish some teaspoons at the sideboard.

‘Did you notice the mail-guard?’ asked one of the travellers.

’No, not particularly; I only got a glimpse of him.  I think he went out again directly,’ replied the other, with his mouth full of food.

‘He’s a devilish fine fellow!  Why, I danced at his wedding.’

‘Indeed.  So he is married?’

’Yes; his wife lives in Lemvig; they have at least two children.  She was a daughter of the innkeeper of Ulstrop, and I arrived there on the very evening of the wedding.  It was a jolly night, you may be sure.’

Karen dropped the teaspoons and went out.  She did not hear them calling to her from the parlour.  She walked across the courtyard to her chamber, closed the door, and began half-unconsciously to arrange the bedclothes.  Her eyes stood rigid in the darkness; she pressed her hands to her head, to her breast; she moaned; she did not understand—­she did not understand—­

But when she heard Madame calling so piteously, ‘Karen, Karen!’ she sprang up, rushed out of the yard, round the back of the house, out—­out upon the heath.

In the twilight the little grassy strip wound in and out among the heather, as if it were a path; but it was no path—­no one must believe it to be a path—­for it led to the very brink of the great turf-pit.

The hare started up; it had heard a splash.  It dashed off with long leaps, as if mad; now contracted, with legs under body and back arched, now drawn out to an incredible length, like a flying accordion, it bounded away over the heather.