He sat down at the table and pursued this train of thought.

“Elizabeth!  Elizabeth! what have you done?” he whispered, presently, with emotion, and hid his forehead in his hands.

“Yes, what has she done?  Nothing, I firmly believe; and that it is just you, Salve, who are mad!  Ah! if I could only really believe that there was nothing to quarrel about, after all!  And I can believe it, if I have only been with her for a while,” he sighed; and then added with a touch of self-contempt, “the fact is, I ought never to go away from home.  I am like an anchovy; I don’t bear taking out of the jar!

“She was so like the old Elizabeth as she stood there and told me all this; it is years since I have seen her like that.  There’s not her match to be found the whole world through.

“She has told me so often that she cares for me, has always cared for me, ever since the time she was living with her grandfather out on the rock; and an untruth never came from her lips.  I’d stake my life upon that.

“For truth—­I believe you, Elizabeth, when you stand like that and tell me so,” and he struck the table as if he was making the declaration to her face.

“But why should she care for me?” he went on.  “Have her thoughts not been running always on things much beyond what I, a poor pilot, and my humble cottage can give her?  Has she not always been hankering after something grand?”

During these days, while this conflict of thought was surging to and fro within him, he had the appearance of a man distraught; and if he ever left the house, he could not rest until he had returned to it again.  The prolonged agitation of mind had told upon him, and he was sitting now—­the day before the one when he was to go in to Arendal again—­alone in his house, feeling very low and depressed; it looked so dreary and empty.

Over in the window, by the leaf-table, where she generally sat to sew, stood the polished buffalo-hoof which he had brought long ago as a curiosity from Monte Video, and had since had made into a weight for her; and by the wall, under the old print of the Naiad, was the elephant, carved out of bone, which he had also had from the time when he was roaming through the world as a sailor before the mast.

He gazed at these things for a while absently, and then went in to their bedroom.

There was the chest of drawers by the wall, on which she always placed the lacquered glass which hung in the other room, when she arranged her beautiful hair.  How many a conversation they had had together as she stood there with her back to him; and what a figure she had! often answering him with merely a change of expression as she looked back at him over her shoulder.  Everything in the room had some such vivid memory to suggest; and as he sat dismally on the side of their bed, adjoining which was little Henrik’s, his thoughts were occupied with many a trivial recollection of the kind, which might seem almost childish in a man of his age and character, and of such a stern, black-bearded exterior; but he was anything but stern now.