his handcuffs.

"It's my fault! Can't you tell them so, Nikolai?" she cried piercingly,
and the policemen took the opportunity to detach her hands.

The sledge dashed off, and Silla, without a shawl, after it, followed by
a swarm of boys.

She saw the door of the police-station open for Nikolai without being
able to reach him or hinder it; hour after hour she passed outside,
listening and waiting, while the constables again and again intimated to
her that she must go home.

When at length she wandered away in despair, she kept stopping; but up
on the bridge over the waterfall she stood still a long while.

It roared so strangely down there in the dark. It seemed as if in some
way or other she belonged to it.

All night she lay with a dull feeling of what had happened, and writhed
under an unspeakable terror for the result of Nikolai's act.

Now and then she groaned out a suffering sigh.

She could not get rid of the sight of the handcuffs, and in her delirium
felt the cold iron still in her hands, until at last the bitter feeling
came over her of how miserably she had behaved to him. She felt as
though the thought of her must make Nikolai sick.

She lay staring at herself as in a vision--how she had gone about and
never thought or cared about anything but her own pleasure, while
Nikolai, her smith boy, with the strong arms and the true eyes, who now
sat behind the prison bolts, had striven and toiled, and saved, and
worked for both of them, so that they might be together.

And she could see too, now, all at once, as if scales had fallen from
her eyes, that he had been terribly afraid for her.

If only he still cared for her! He had said: "Go home, Silla"--twice--so
kindly and gently, that she began to cry when she thought of it.

Had she known or understood what it was to love anybody before just now?
And perhaps it was too late!

The thought filled her with despair again, and wild pictures arose in
her mind--Veyergang falling and lying stretched upon the snow, and then
Nikolai's arms with the handcuffs on them stretching up out of the
factory waterfall.

She lay awake until the morning and saw the same things--the handcuffs
in the waterfall, and Veyergang turning away from the blow and falling;
and then the whole thing over again--and again.

She sat there the whole day until dusk. Then her restlessness drove her
down to the police-station.

There the gas was already lighted in the passages, and the