ere there, and said how lonely it would be
now in his house, and how good and faithful she (his dead wife) had
been, how many years they had wandered together through life, and how
it had come about that they came to know each other and to fall in
love. I was, as I have told you, a boy, and only stood by and listened
to what the others said; but it filled me with quite a strange emotion
to listen to the old man, and to watch how his cheeks gradually
flushed red when he spoke of the days of their courtship, and told how
beautiful she was, and how many little innocent pretexts he had
invented to meet her. And then he talked of the wedding-day, and his
eyes gleamed; he seemed to talk himself back into that time of joy.
And yet she was lying in the next room--dead--an old woman; and he was
an old man, speaking of the past days of hope! Yes, yes, thus it is!
Then I was but a child, and now I am old--as old as Preben Schwane was
then. Time passes away, and all things change. I can very well
remember the day when she was buried, and how Preben Schwane walked
close behind the coffin. A few years before, the couple had caused
their gravestone to be prepared, and their names to be engraved on it,
with the inscription, all but the date. In the evening the stone was
taken to the churchyard, and laid over the grave; and the year
afterwards it was taken up, that old Preben Schwane might be laid to
rest beside his wife. They did not leave behind them anything like the
wealth people had attributed to them: what there was went to families
distantly related to them--to people of whom until then one had known
nothing. The old wooden house, with the seat at the top of the steps,
beneath the lime tree, was taken down by the corporation; it was too
old and rotten to be left standing. Afterwards, when the same fate
befell the convent church, and the graveyard was levelled, Preben's
and Martha's tombstone was sold, like everything else, to any one who
would buy it; and that is how it has happened that this stone was not
hewn in two, as many another has been, but that it still lies below in
the yard as a scouring-bench for the maids and a plaything for the
children. The high-road now goes over the resting-place of old Preben
and his wife. No one thinks of them any more."

And the old man who had told all this shook his head scornfully.

"Forgotten! Everything will be forgotten!" he said.

And then they spoke in the room of other things; but t