Then, with a swift rekindling of energy, he darted forward,
and his broad hands fell with a tiger-like grip on Maurice's
shoulders. But hark! The voices of the skies and the mountains echo
the groan. The air, surcharged with terror, whirls in wild eddies,
then holds its breath and trembles. All eyes are turned toward the
glacier. The huge white ridge, gleaming here and there through a cloud
of smoke, is pushing down over the mountain-side, a black bulwark of
earth rising totteringly before it, and a chaos of bowlders and blocks
of ice following, with dull crunching and grinding noises, in its
train. The barns and the store-house of the Ormgrass farm are seen
slowly climbing the moving earth-wall, then follows the
mansion--rising--rising--and with a tremendous, deafening crash the
whole huge avalanche sweeps downward into the fjord. The water is
lashed into foam; an enormous wave bearing on its crest the shattered
wrecks of human homes, rolls onward; the good ship _Queen Anne_ is
tossed skyward, her cable snaps and springs upward against the
mast-head, shrieks of terror fill the air, and the sea flings its
strong, foam-wreathed arms against the farther shore.

A dead silence follows. The smoke scatters, breaks into drifting
fragments, showing the black naked mountain-side.

The next morning, as the first glimmerings of the dawn pierced the
cloud-veil in the east, the brig _Queen Anne_ shot before a steady
breeze out toward the western ocean. In the prow stood Maurice Fern,
in a happy reverie; on a coil of rope at his feet sat Tharald
Ormgrass, staring vacantly before him. His face was cold and hard; it
had scarcely stirred from its dead apathy since the hour of the
calamity. Then there was a patter of light footsteps on the deck, and
Elsie, still with something of the child-like wonder of sleep in her
eyes, emerged from behind the broad white sail.

Tharald saw her and the hardness died out of his face. He strove to
speak once--twice, but could not.

"God pity me," he broke out, with an emotion deeper than his words
suggested. "I was wrong. I had no faith in you. She has. Take her,
that the old wrong may at last be righted."

And there, under God's free sky, their hands were joined together, and
the father whispered a blessing.

A KNIGHT OF DANNEBROG.

I.

Victor Julien St. Denis Dannevig is a very aristocratic
conglomeration of sound, as every one will admit, although the St. had
a touch of irony in