Madame Garvloit would take her to task sometimes for the scant courtesy with which she treated the young clerk.  Elizabeth would answer that he bored her; and Madame Garvloit would insist that a young girl ought to have tact enough not to make this evident.  Elizabeth, however, was not deficient in tact, but disliked putting a restraint upon her feelings; and it seemed to her on the whole unreasonable that a person should pretend that a thing was pleasant when in reality it was wearisome.

During the second autumn of her service with the Garvloits, the skipper, on his return from a trip to Norway, brought the intelligence that Lieutenant Beck was engaged to Postmaster Forstberg’s daughter in Arendal, and he had many messages for Elizabeth from the latter.  They were to be married in the spring.

Elizabeth was overjoyed to hear it, for the thought had often weighed heavily on her mind that Carl Beck might be making himself miserable on her account.  She judged so from her own feeling for Salve:  and as she sat alone by her window at bedtime that night, gazing out over the canal and the shipping in the calm moonlight, the quiet afterglow of a holiday evening seemed to have shed itself over her thoughts.  She knew from her friend’s message that she was ignorant of what had passed between herself and Carl Beck; and although it was a relief to think that he had not taken his disappointment more to heart, the smile that played about her lips for a moment showed at the same time that his love had been duly appraised.  As the shadow, then, of the window-frame in the moonlight, crept slowly over the wall above her bed, her thoughts glided off in the direction they loved best to take—­over the world and far away to Salve.

She sat with her heavy hair falling loose over her well-shaped shoulders, and her face grew more and more sorrowful in its absent expression, and would twitch occasionally with pain.  The bitter thought would recur that it was she who was the cause of Salve’s going out into the world and becoming a desperate man.  The thought haunted her; and yet, much as she wished to free herself from it, she found a pleasure in dwelling on it.  She saw him, in fancy, miserable and proud, with his pale face and keen, clever eyes fixed upon her in hatred, as the cause of his unhappiness, and then the idea occurred to her to put on sailor’s clothes and go and seek him out in the world.  But if she were to find him, she knew, on the other hand, that for very shame she dared not show herself before him, having as good as belonged to another; and she would not for all the world read her hard dismissal in his eye.  She laid her head upon her arms on the window-sill and sobbed convulsively, until at length she dropped off to sleep where she sat.

She had been three years in the Garvloits’ house when Garvloit had the misfortune to run his vessel aground out near Amland, where she became a wreck.  He lost with her nearly all he had in the world, and what was worse, all prospect of livelihood for the future as skipper.