“Yes, how can I tell that?  Do I know the whirlwind’s roads?”

“Was the letter signed with your name?”

“No; but don’t you think I will acknowledge my handwriting?” replied Bagger, quite earnestly.

This earnestness with reference to an obligation which no one understood became comical; and Bagger felt at the moment that he was on the brink of the ridiculous.  Trying to collect himself, he said: 

“Is it not an obligation we all have?  Do not both bride and bridegroom acknowledge that long before they knew each other the obligation was present?”

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed the bridegroom.

“And the whirlwind, accident, the unknown power, brought them together so that the obligation was redeemed?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Let us, then,” continued Bagger, “drink a toast to the wind, the accident, the moving power, unknown and yet controlling.  To those of us who, as yet, are unprovided for and under forty, it will at some time undoubtedly bring a bride; to those who are already provided for will come the expected in another form.  So a toast to the wind that came in here and flickered the lights; to the unknown, that brings us the wished for; and to ourselves, that we may be prepared to receive it when announced.”

“Bravo!” exclaimed the bridegroom, looking upon his bride.

“Puh-h-h!” thought Bagger, seating himself with intense relief, “I have come out of it somewhat decently after all.  The deuce take me before I again express a sentimentality.”

How Counsellor Bagger that night could have fallen asleep, between memory, or longing and discontent, is difficult to tell, had he not on his arrival home found a package of papers, an interesting theft case.  He sat down instantly to read, and day dawned ere they were finished.  His last thought, before his eyelids closed, was,—­ Two years in the House of Correction.

III.

A month later, toward the close of September, two ladies, twenty or twenty-two years of age, were walking in a garden about ten miles from Copenhagen.  Although the walks were quite wide, impediments in them made it difficult for the ladies to go side by side.  The autumn showed itself uneven and jagged.  The currant and gooseberry boughs, that earlier hung in soft arches, now projected stiffly forth, catching in the ladies’ dresses; branches from plum and apple trees hung bare and broken, and required attention above also.  One of the ladies apparently was at home there:  this was evident partly from her dress, which, although elegant, was domestic, and partly by her taking the lead and paying honor, by drawing boughs and branches aside, holding them until the other lady, who was more showily dressed, had slipped past.  On account of the hindrances of the walk there were none of those easy, subdued, familiar conversations, which otherwise so naturally arise