e clergyman good-bye, gathered his few
worldly goods together and set out for Bergen. There he found an English
steamer which carried him to Hull, and a few weeks later, he was once
more in New York.

It was late one evening in January that a tug-boat arrived and took the
cabin passengers ashore. The moon sailed tranquilly over the deep blue
dome of the sky, the stars traced their glittering paths of light from
the zenith downward, and it was sharp, bitter cold. Northward over the
river lay a great bank of cloud, dense, gray and massive, the spectre
of the coming snow-storm. There it lay so huge and fantastically human,
ruffling itself up, as fowls do, in defense against the cold. Halfdan
walked on at a brisk rate--strange to say, all the street-cars he met
went the wrong way--startling every now and then some precious memory,
some word or look or gesture of Edith's which had hovered long
over those scenes, waiting for his recognition. There was the great
jewel-store where Edith had taken him so often to consult his taste
whenever a friend of hers was to be married. It was there that they had
had an amicable quarrel over that bronze statue of Faust which she
had found beautiful, while he, with a rudeness which seemed now quite
incomprehensible, had insisted that it was not. And when he had
failed to convince her, she had given him her hand in token of
reconciliation--and Edith had a wonderful way of giving her hand, which
made any one feel that it was a peculiar privilege to press it--and they
had walked out arm in arm into the animated, gas-lighted streets, with
a delicious sense of snugness and security, being all the more closely
united for their quarrel. Here, farther up the avenue, they had once
been to a party, and he had danced for the first time in his life
with Edith. Here was Delmonico's, where they had had such fascinating
luncheons together; where she had got a stain on her dress, and he had
been forced to observe that her dress was then not really a part of
herself, since it was a thing that could not be stained. Her dress had
always seemed to him as something absolute and final, exalted above
criticism, incapable of improvement.

As I have said, Halfdan walked briskly up the avenue, and it was
something after eleven when he reached the house which he sought. The
great cloud-bank in the north had then begun to expand and stretched its
long misty arms eastward and westward over the heavens. The windows on