"How can I see it, Hilda, when the point of thy finger covers it?"

"Oh! well," drawing the finger down a little, "thou seest it now?"

"Yes."

"Well, that is--why! where is Christian?" she exclaimed, looking up
suddenly in great surprise, and pointing to the stool on which the
hermit certainly had been sitting a few minutes before, but which was
now vacant.

"He must have gone out while we were busy with the--the parchment," said
Erling, also much surprised.

"He went like a mouse, then," said Hilda, "for I heard him not."

"Nor I," added her companion.

"Very strange," said she.

Now there was nothing particularly strange in the matter. The fact was
that the old man had just exercised a little of Erling's philosophy in
the way of projecting a cause to its result. As we have elsewhere
hinted, the hermit was not one of those ascetics who, in ignorance of
the truth, banished themselves out of the world. His banishment had not
been self-imposed. He had fled before the fierce persecutors. They
managed to slay the old man's wife, however, before they made him take
to flight and seek that refuge and freedom of conscience among the Pagan
Northmen which were denied him in Christian Europe. In the first ten
minutes after the A B C class began he perceived how things stood with
the young people, and, wisely judging that the causes which were
operating in their hearts would proceed to their issue more pleasantly
in his absence, he quietly got up and went out to cut firewood.

After this the hermit invariably found it necessary to go out and cut
firewood when Erling and Hilda arrived at the school, which they did
regularly three times a week.

This, of course, was considered a very natural and proper state of
things by the two young people, for they were both considerate by
nature, and would have been sorry indeed to have interrupted the old man
in his regular work.

But Erling soon began to feel that it was absolutely essential for one
of them to be in advance of the other in regard to knowledge, if the
work of teaching was to go on; for, while both remained equally
ignorant, the fiction could not be kept up with even the semblance of
propriety. To obviate this difficulty he paid solitary nocturnal visits
to the hut, on which occasions he applied himself so zealously to the
study of the strange characters that he not only became as expert as his
teacher, but left her far behind, and triumphantly rebutted the c