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wall above her bed. Noticing it, she moved her hand. She
lay down on the bed and mechanically pushed off her shoes
with her feet, and put her hand under the cover to prevent the
blood from making a mess.
She did not think; she was not afraid; she felt only that she
was surrendering to the inevitable. The pain of the cut was
not great—only sharp and distinct, and concentrated on one
spot.
After a while a strange, unknown sensation took hold of
her, an agony that grew and grew—not a fear of anything in
particular, but the feeling of an ache round her heart and
sickness, as it were. She opened her eyes, but black specks
flickered before her sight and she could not breathe. The room
seemed to crumble down on her. She tumbled out of bed, tore
the door open, rushed up the stairs to the roof, and collapsed
on the last step.
Helge had met Gunnar Heggen as he came out of the front
door. They had looked at each other, both touching their
hats, and passed on without a word.
That meeting had sobered Helge. After the intoxication of
the night his mood instantly changed to the other extreme, and
what he had experienced seemed to him incredible,
inconceivable, and monstrous.
He had dreamt of this meeting with her all these years. She,
the queen of his dreams, had scarcely spoken to him, at first
sitting quiet and cold and then suddenly throwing herself into
his arms, wild, mad, without saying a word. It struck him now
that she had said nothing—nothing at all to his words of love
in the night. A strange, apalling woman, his Jenny. He
realized suddenly that she had never been his.
Helge walked about in the quiet streets, up and down the
Corso. He tried to think of her as she had been when they
were engaged, to separate the dreams from the reality, but he
could not form a clear picture of her, and he realized that he
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