What these idle wooers gleaned from her stories, her characteristic dress, her wondering eyes, and her quiet dreaminess, was not the highest, but they expended their energy thereon; so that their unbounded discomfiture may be imagined when, in the autumn, the news spread that Fruken Kristen Ravn was married to Harald Kaas.

They burst into peals of derisive laughter they scoffed, they exclaimed; the only explanation they could offer was that they had too long hesitated to try their fortune.

There were others, who both knew and admired her, who were no less dismayed.  They were more than disappointed—­the word is too weak; to many of them it seemed simply deplorable.  How on earth could it have happened?  Every one, herself excepted, knew that it would ruin her life.

On Kristen Ravn’s independent position, her strong character, her rare courage, on her knowledge, gifts, and energy, many, especially women, had built up a future for the cause of Woman.  Had she not already written fearlessly for it?  Her tendency towards eccentricity and paradox would soon have worn off, they thought, as the struggle carried her forward, and at last she might have become one of the first champions of the cause.  All that was noblest and best in Kristen must predominate in the end.

And now the few who seek to explain life’s perplexities rather than to condemn them discovered—­Some of them, that the defiant tone of her writings and her love of opposition bespoke a degree of vanity sufficient to have led her into fallacy.  Others maintained that hers was essentially a romantic nature which might cause her to form a false estimate both of her own powers and of the circumstances of life.  Others, again, had heard something of how this husband and wife lived, one in each wing of the house, with different staffs of servants, and with separate incomes; that she had furnished her side in her own way, at her own expense, and had apparently conceived the idea of a new kind of married life.  Some people declared that the great lime-trees near the mansion at Hellebergene were alone responsible for the marriage.  They soughed so wondrously in the summer evenings, and the sea beneath their branches told such enthralling stories.  Those grand old woods, the like of which were hardly to be found in impoverished Norway, were far dearer to her than was her husband.  Her imagination had been taken captive by the trees, and thus Harald Kaas had taken her.  The estate, the climate, the exclusive possession of her part of the house:  this was the bait which she had chosen.  Harald Kaas was only a kind of Puck who had to be taken along with it.  But it is doubtful whether this conjecture was any nearer the truth.  No one ever really knew.  She was not one of those whom it is easy to catechise.