“I am overjoyed to hear it, Elizabeth, for I had heard otherwise,” said Fru Beck, with some embarrassment—­and there was another pause.  She felt from Elizabeth’s manner and bearing that she had wounded her self-esteem; and this last unlucky speech, she was afraid, had made matters worse.

There was a movement in the adjoining room, and Elizabeth was glad of an occasion to break the rather painful silence, and went in to her aunt for a moment.

Fru Beck looked after her with a rather surprised, but an unsatisfied, expression; she must have been mistaken:  but still, happy in her home Elizabeth could scarcely be.  And yet, she thought bitterly, what a gulf there was between them!  She, at all events, loved her husband.

When Elizabeth returned, Fru Beck, with the idea of effacing the impression she had already produced, and to satisfy, at the same time, her own longing to open her heart to somebody, said—­

“You must not be offended at what I said, Elizabeth.  I thought that others might have sorrow too.”

“We all have our burden, and often it is very hard to bear,” rejoined Elizabeth.  She understood very well what Fru Beck’s words had meant, and looked at her compassionately; but she avoided answering directly to what she thought had been blurted out unintentionally, and said—­

“You have a son.  That should be a great happiness, Fru Beck, and much to live for.”

“To live for!” she exclaimed—­“to live for!  I will confide to you something that no one but you now knows.  I am dying—­dying every day.  No one knows as well as I do myself how much is left of me.  It is little, and it will soon be less.”  She spoke in a cold, pale kind of ecstasy.  “You are the only creature I have told this to—­the only one on this earth I really care about; hear it and forget it.  And now, adieu,” she said; “if we ever meet again in this world, don’t let the subject be mentioned between us.”  She felt blindly for the door, and opened it.

“Every cross comes from above, and the worst of all sins is to despair,” said Elizabeth, with an attempt at consolation; she said what most readily occurred to her at the moment.

Fru Beck turned at the door, and looked back at her with a white, calm, joyless face.

“Elizabeth,” she said, “I found this in one of my husband’s drawers.  I tell it you, that you may not think that that has been in any way the cause of my spoilt life.”

She took from her pocket a scrap of paper, yellow with age, and handed it to her.  The door closed behind her then, and she was gone.

Elizabeth sat still for a long while in sad distress, thinking of her.  Now she understood why Fru Beck was so pale.  She had not a wrinkle in her face—­it looked so noble; but oh how cold, how pinched it had become!  Poor, poor woman! her burden was indeed a heavy one.  It would have been difficult to recognise Marie Forstberg again in her.