s, as if she had been a relation; but she
gave him a box on the ear, and told him she could not bear him, at
which there was great laughter, as if that had been a very amusing
thing.

And perhaps it was very amusing, for, five years afterwards,
when Marie had fulfilled her seventeenth year, a messenger arrived
with a letter, in which Lord Gyldenlowe proposed for the hand of the
noble young lady. There was a thing for you!

"He is the grandest and most gallant gentleman in the whole
country," said Grubbe the knight; "that is not a thing to despise."

"I don't care so very much about him," said Marie Grubbe; but
she did not despise the grandest man of all the country, who sat by
the king's side.

Silver plate, and fine linen and woollen, went off to Copenhagen
in a ship, while the bride made the journey by land in ten days. But
the outfit met with contrary winds, or with no winds at all, for
four months passed before it arrived; and when it came, my Lady
Gyldenlowe was gone.

"I'd rather lie on coarse sacking than lie in his silken beds,"
she declared. "I'd rather walk barefoot than drive with him in a
coach!"

Late one evening in November two women came riding into the town
of Aarhuus. They were the gracious Lady Gyldenlowe (Marie Grubbe)
and her maid. They came from the town of Weile, whither they had
come in a ship from Copenhagen. They stopped at Lord Grubbe's stone
mansion in Aarhuus. Grubbe was not well pleased with this visit. Marie
was accosted in hard words; but she had a bedroom given her, and got
her beer soup of a morning; but the evil part of her father's nature
was aroused against her, and she was not used to that. She was not
of a gentle temper, and we often answer as we are addressed. She
answered openly, and spoke with bitterness and hatred of her
husband, with whom she declared she would not live; she was too
honorable for that.

A year went by, but it did not go by pleasantly. There were evil
words between the father and the daughter, and that ought never to be.
Bad words bear bad fruit. What could be the end of such a state of
things?

"We two cannot live under the same roof," said the father one day.
"Go away from here to our old manor house; but you had better bite
your tongue off than spread any lies among the people."

And so the two parted. She went with her maid to the old castle
where she had been born, and near which the gentle, pious lady, her
mother, was lying in the church vaul