“Herr Beck!” she exclaimed wildly, and with tears in her eyes, “I leave this house—­this very night—­if you say a word more.”

She disappeared into the hall, but he followed her.

“Elizabeth,” he whispered, “I mean it in earnest.”  She tore herself hastily from him, and went into the kitchen, where his sisters were talking together over the fire.

Carl went out for a solitary walk over the island in the glorious starlight night, and didn’t come in till past midnight.

He had not meant what he said quite so decidedly in earnest; but now after seeing her standing before him so wondrously beautiful, with tears in her eyes—­now he meant it in real earnest.  He was prepared to engage himself, if necessary, in spite of every consideration.

The next morning he left in his boat for Arendal, having whispered to her, however, in passing, before he left, “I mean it in earnest.”

The repetition of these words threw Elizabeth into dire perplexity.  She had lain and thought over them the night before, and had thrust them from her with indignation, for they could mean nothing else than that he had brought himself to dare to tell her that he had conceived a passion for her, and she had quite determined to execute her threat and leave the house.

But now, repeated in this tone!

Did he really mean to ask for her hand and heart—­to ask her to be his—­an officer’s wife?  There lay before her fancy a glittering expanse of earlier dreams that almost made her giddy; and the whole week she was absent and pale, thinking anxiously of Sunday, when he was to return.  What would he say then?

And—­what should she answer?

He didn’t come, however, his duties having required him to make another journey that he had not reckoned upon.

On the other hand Marie Forstberg did appear, and felt at once that some change or other must have come over Elizabeth, as she pointedly declined all assistance from her; and in the look which Marie Forstberg intercepted by chance, there was something even hard and unfriendly.  She laid her hand once gently upon Elizabeth’s shoulder, but it produced, apparently, absolutely no impression—­she might as well have caressed a piece of wood; and when she returned to the sitting-room again, she couldn’t help asking, “What has happened to Elizabeth?” But the others had not observed anything unusual.

Carl Beck, contrary to his custom, came not on the following Saturday, but before it, in the middle of the week; and he strode with hasty steps through the rooms when he didn’t see Elizabeth.

He found her at last up-stairs.  She was standing gazing out of the window on the landing, out of which all that was to be seen was the wooded slope of the hill and the sky above it.  She heard his step—­she knew that he was coming up-stairs—­and felt a sudden indefinable sense of apprehension—­a sort of panic almost—­as if she could have jumped out of the window.  What should she answer?