g directly to
what she thought had been blurted out unintentionally, and said--

"You have a son. That should be a great happiness, Fru Beck, and much to
live for."

"To live for!" she exclaimed--"to live for! I will confide to you
something that no one but you now knows. I am dying--dying every day. No
one knows as well as I do myself how much is left of me. It is little,
and it will soon be less." She spoke in a cold, pale kind of ecstasy.
"You are the only creature I have told this to--the only one on this
earth I really care about; hear it and forget it. And now, adieu," she
said; "if we ever meet again in this world, don't let the subject be
mentioned between us." She felt blindly for the door, and opened it.

"Every cross comes from above, and the worst of all sins is to despair,"
said Elizabeth, with an attempt at consolation; she said what most
readily occurred to her at the moment.

Fru Beck turned at the door, and looked back at her with a white, calm,
joyless face.

"Elizabeth," she said, "I found this in one of my husband's drawers. I
tell it you, that you may not think that that has been in any way the
cause of my spoilt life."

She took from her pocket a scrap of paper, yellow with age, and handed
it to her. The door closed behind her then, and she was gone.

Elizabeth sat still for a long while in sad distress, thinking of her.
Now she understood why Fru Beck was so pale. She had not a wrinkle in
her face--it looked so noble; but oh how cold, how pinched it had
become! Poor, poor woman! her burden was indeed a heavy one. It would
have been difficult to recognise Marie Forstberg again in her.

"That, then, it is to have married unhappily," she said to herself. She
seemed to have gazed into some terrible abyss.

Her friend's sorrows continued to occupy her thoughts as she sat by her
aunt's bedside; and when at last her feelings of compassion had calmed
down, another point in their conversation that had been hitherto thrown
into the background came into increasing prominence. It lay in the words
that had so suddenly and grievously wounded her.

"So, that is what the world says of us," she thought: "that our marriage
has been unhappy."

She had time and solitude enough, while tending her patient and sitting
up with her, to ponder the matter; and as she thought over her married
life, and contemplated unflinchingly the constant, weary, fruitless
struggle in which it had passed, and in which she had