face; so
young and smiling, so untried by life, did she look, that her fair
head seemed bathed in perpetual sunlight. But it was only a short
spring-time of joy. Balder had not yet commenced to distinguish between
poetry and reality, when his mother was suddenly attacked by a violent
nervous fever, and after a few days' illness, during which she
recognized neither husband nor children, she left them forever.

It was a blow which brought her husband to a state of despair which
bordered upon madness. But upon the older boy the event had a strange
effect. There was, at first, an outburst of wild, passionate grief,
such as, from his steady, quiet temperament, no one would have
expected. Now it was evident how passionately he had loved his mother,
with a fervor for which he had never found words. Up to the time of the
funeral it was impossible to induce him to eat; he pushed away his
favorite dishes with loathing, and only a little milk crossed his lips
just before he went to bed. When he returned with his father from the
churchyard, and, himself like a corpse, saw in his father's face every
sign of breaking down under the misery of a happiness so cruelly
destroyed, while little Balder gazed in perplexity at him with his dead
mother's eyes, a great transformation seemed to take place in the older
brother's soul. His convulsed face grew suddenly calm, he pushed from
his forehead his thin straight hair, and, going up to his father, said:
"We must now see how we can get along without mother. You shall never
be dissatisfied with me again." Then he sat down on the floor beside
the child, and began to play with him as his mother used to do; a thing
to which, hitherto, with all his love for the little one, he had never
condescended. Balder stretched out his hands to him, and laughingly
prattled on in his merry way. The father seemed to take no notice of
anything that was passing around him. Weeks and months elapsed before
he even outwardly returned to his old habits.

But even then there was not much gained. The portion of him which had
been a calculating-machine faultlessly continued its work, but the
human affections were totally destroyed. Had not Edwin, with a prudence
wonderful in one so young, managed the affairs of the little household
when the old maid servant could not get along alone, everything would
have been in confusion. When, during the year after his mother's death,
the child had a fall which injured his knee so se