ction.

Once, however, the bow had smitten his heart-strings with a new result
of sound, awakening fresh ideas of harmony. When Thor was swept to
death by that Baltic wave, Balder leapt after him, hopeless to save,
but without demur! The sea hurled him back alone. For many a month
thereafter, strange lights and shadows flashed or gloomed across his
sky, and sounds from unknown abysses disquieted him. But all was not
quite enough; perhaps he was hewn from too stanch materials lightly to
change. Yet the sudden shock of his loss left its mark: the props of
self-confidence were a little unsettled; and the events whose course
we have traced were therefore able to shake them down.

For Destiny rained her sharpest blows on Balder Helwyse all at once,
and the attack marks the turning-point of his life. She chose her
weapons wisely. He was beaten by tactics which a coarser and shallower
nature would have slighted. He sustained the onslaught for the most
part with outward composure,--but bleeding inwardly.

His had been a vast egoism, rooted in his nature and trained by his
philosophy. It must die, if at all, violently, painfully, and--in
silence. The truer and more constant the soul, the more complete the
destruction of its idol. Character is not always the slow growth of
years: often do the elements mingle long in formless solution; some
sudden jar causes them to spring at once to the definite crystal.
There had, hitherto, been a kind of impersonality about Balder, having
its ultimate ground in his blindness to the immutable unity of God.
But so soon as his eye became single, he stood pronounced in his
individuality, less broadly indifferent than of yore, but organized
and firm.

In this inert world the body pursues but imperfectly the processes of
the soul. These three days had made small change in Helwyse's face.
His expression was less serene than of yore, but pithier as well as
more joyful. The humorous indifference had given place to a kindlier
humanity. Gone was the glance half satiric, half sympathetic; but in
its stead was something warmer and more earnest. For the charity of
scepticism was substituted a sentiment less broad, but deeper and
truer. It would need an insight supernaturally keen to detect thus
early these alterations in the page of Balder's countenance; but their
germs are there, to develop afterwards.

During this pause in our narrative, Helwyse was sitting at his chamber
window, awaiting the summons