en making them
uncomfortable relaxed. Krog and Mrs. Dawes felt safe, as far as Frans
Roey was concerned. So did Joergen Thiis.

At half-past eight they went upstairs again. Mary at once retired to her
room, pleading fatigue. She lay and listened to Joergen playing. Then she
lay and wept.

* * * * *

Next evening, on the sea, wide and motionless, the faint twilight
ushered in the summer night. Two pillars of smoke rose in the distance.
Except for these, the dull grey above and beneath was unbroken. Mary
leaned against the rail. No one was in sight, and the thud of the engine
was the only sound.

She had been listening to music downstairs, and had left the others
there. An unspeakable feeling of loneliness had driven her up to this
barren outlook--clouds as far as the eye could reach.

Nothing but clouds; not even the reflection of the sun which had gone
down.

And was there anything more than this left of the brightness of the
world from which she came? Was there not the very same emptiness in and
around herself? The life of travel was now at an end; neither her father
nor Mrs. Dawes could or would continue to lead it; this she understood.
At Krogskogen there was not one neighbour she cared for. In the town,
half an hour's journey off, there was not a human being to whom she was
bound by any tie of intimacy. She had never given herself time to make
such ties. She was at home nowhere. The life which springs from the soil
of a place and unites us to everything that grows there was not hers.
Wherever she made her appearance, the conversation seemed to stop, in
order that another subject, suited to her, might be introduced. The
globe-trotters who wandered about with her talked of incidents of
travel, of the art-galleries and the music of the towns which they were
visiting--occasionally, too, of problems which pursued them, let them
go where they would. But of these not one affected her personally. The
conventional utterances on such subjects she knew by heart. Indeed, the
whole was either a kind of practice in language, or else aimless chat to
pass the time.

The homage paid her, which at times verged on worship, had begun when
she was still a child and took it as fun. In course of time it had
become as familiar to her as the figures of a quadrille. One incident
which alarmed the whole family, a couple of incidents which were
painful, had been long forgotten; the admiration she receive