“That I can truly give.  I am as blind as"...

“Let me add the witch-formulae.”

“O Ingeborg, you will write upon the same paper with me, in a letter where I have written your name!”

“Hand me the pen.  We must have the letter sent to the mail before two o’clock.”

“Two o’clock.  How queer!  The last letter reads:  ’Take notice of the striking two.’”

“That we will,” said Ingeborg.

She wrote:  “Dear Miss Brandt, I, too, ask you to send the Counsellor his billet, and I pray you to write upon it:  ’Given me by Miss Hjelm.’  It is best for all parties that the fun does not come out in gossip.  You shall, by return of mail, receive back your letters.”

VI.

It is allowed to charitable minds to remain in doubt about what had really been Miss Brandt’s design.  Perhaps she only wished to make roguish psychological experiments, to convince herself to how many forenoon congratulatory visits a Counsellor of Justice of the Superior Court could be brought to appear.  The emotion she almost exposed, when at Mrs. Canuteson’s she saw Bagger by Miss Hjelm’s side, may have been pure surprise at the working of the affair.  Every one of the rest of us who have been conversant with the whirlwind, the letter, and Ingeborg’s relinquishment of the same, would also have been surprised at seeing her and the letter-writer brought together notwithstanding, and would not, perhaps, have been able with as much ease and success to hide our surprise.  The letter to Bagger, in which Miss Brandt, contrary to her better knowledge, spoke of him as married, may have been a sincere attempt to end the whole in a way which repentance and anxiety quickly seized upon to put an insurmountable hindrance before herself; but it may surely enough have had also the aim to see how far Bagger had gone and how much spirit and fancy he had to carry the intrigue out.  The more one thinks upon it, the less one feels able to give either of the two interpretations absolute preference.  Yet one will have remarked, that Ingeborg herself in her little note mentioned the matter as “fun.”  On the other side, if it was earnestness, if she had felt “somewhat” for Counsellor Bagger, then let us take comfort in the fact that Miss Brandt was a well-cultivated girl, and that her intellect held dominion over her heart.  She could with one eye see that the campaign had ended, and further, that she, by receiving peace pure and simple, had certainly not gained any conquest, but obtained the status quo ante bellum, which often between antagonists has been considered so respectable, that both parties officially have sung Te Deum, although surely only one could sing it from the heart.  Now it is and may remain undecided what the real state of the case was:  from either point of view there was a plain and even line drawn for her, and she followed it.  Next day the letter came in an envelope directed to the counsellor.