st both be serious. Now, Elsie dear, tell me honestly
if you love me enough to become my wife now, at once."

The girl cast timid glances around her, as if to make sure that they
were unobserved. Then she laid her arms round his neck, gazed for a
moment with that trustful look of hers into his eyes, and put up her
lips to be kissed.

"That is no answer, my dear," he said, smiling, but responding readily
to the invitation. "I wish to know if you care enough for me to go
away with me to a foreign land, and live with me always as my wife."

"I cannot live anywhere without you," she murmured, sadly.

"And then you will do as I wish?"

"But it will take three weeks to have the banns published, and you
know father would never allow that."

"That is the very reason why I wish you to do without his consent. If
you will board the steamer with me to-morrow night, we will go to
England and there we can be married without the publishing of banns,
and before any one can overtake us."

"But that would be very wrong, wouldn't it? I think the Bible says so,
somewhere."

"In Bible times marriages were on a different basis from what they are
now. Moreover, love was not such an inexorable thing then, nor
engagements so pressing."

She looked up with eyes full of pathetic remonstrance, and was sadly
puzzled.

"Then you will come, darling?" he urged, with lover-like
persuasiveness. "Say that you will."

"I will--try," she whispered, tearfully, and hid her troubled face on
his bosom.

"One thing more," he went on. "Your house is built on the brink of
eternity. The glacier is moving down upon you silently but surely. I
have warned your father, but he will not believe me. I have chosen
this way of rescuing you, because it is the only way."

The next evening Maurice and his servant stood on the pier, waiting
impatiently for Elsie, until the whistle sounded, and the
black-hulled boat moved onward, ploughing its foamy path through the
billows. But Elsie did not come.

Another week passed, and Maurice, fired with a new and desperate
resolution, started for the capital, and during the coming winter the
glacier was left free to continue its baneful plottings undisturbed by
the importunate eyes of science. Immediately on his arrival in the
city he set on foot a suit in his father's name against Tharald
Gudmundson Ormgrass, to recover his rightful inheritance.

VII.

On a cold, bleak day, in the latter part of March, we find