A couple of weeks after the receipt of the letter, one evening about seven o’clock, the counsellor sat at home, not as before by his writing-table busy with acts, but on a corner of the sofa, with drooping arms, deeply absorbed in a mixture of anxious doubts and dreaming expectations.  Hope built air-castles, and doubt then puffed them over like card-houses.  One of his fancies was, that she summoned him—­he would not even in thought use the expression:  gave him an interview—­at a masquerade.  It was consequently no common masquerade, but a grand, elegant masked ball, to which a true lady could repair.  The clock was at eleven, the appointed hour:  he waited anxiously the pressing five minutes; then she came and extended him the fine hand in the finest straw-colored glove—­

“Letter to the Counsellor of Justice,” said Jens, with strong Funen accent, and short, soldierly pronunciation.

It is so uncommon that what one longs for comes just at the moment of most earnest desire; but notwithstanding the letter was from her, the Counsellor of Justice knew the superscription, would have known it among a hundred thousand.  The letter read thus: 

“I ought to be open towards you; and, as we shall never meet, I can be so.”

Here the Counsellor of Justice stopped a moment and caught for breath.  A good many of our twenty-year-old beaux, who have never been admitted to the bar, far less have been Court Counsellors, would, under similar circumstances, have said to themselves:  “She writes that she will be open; that is to say, now she will fool me:  we will never meet; that is to say, now I shall soon see her.”  But Counsellor Bagger believed every word as gospel, and his knees trembled.  He read further: 

“I am ashamed of the few words I last wrote you; but my apology is, that it is only two days since I learned that you are married.  I have been mistaken, but more in what may be imputed to me than in what I have thought.  My only comfort is, that I shall never be known by you or anybody, and that I shall be forgotten, as I shall forget.”

“Never!  But who can have spread the infamous slander!  What dreadful treachery of some wretch or gossiping wench, who knows nothing about me!  And how can she believe it!  How in such a town as Copenhagen can it be a matter of doubt for five minutes, if a Superior Court Counsellor is married or not!  Or maybe there is some other Counsellor Bagger married,—­a Chamber Counsellor or the like?  Or maybe she lives at a distance, in a quiet world, so that the truth of it does not easily reach her?  So there is no sunshine more!

“If she should sometime meet me, and know that I was, am, and have been unmarried, that meanwhile we have both become old and gray,—­ can one think of anything more sad?  It is enough to make the heart cease beating!  But suppose, too, that to-morrow she finds out that she has been deceived:  she has once written, ‘I was mistaken,’ and cannot, as a true woman, write it again, unless she first heard from me, and learned how I longed—­and so I am cut off from her, as if I lived in the moon.  More, more! for I can meet her upon the street and touch her arm without surmising it.  It is insupportable!  Our time has mail, steamboats, railroads, telegraphs:  to me these do not exist; for of what use are they altogether, when one knows not where to search.”