s mind--she accepted them not only in theory but in practice, and
the result was that she accepted her beauty as she accepted her
health,--as a mere natural occurrence--no more. She was taught that the
three principal virtues of a woman were chastity, humility, and
obedience,--these were the laws of God, fixed and immutable, which no
one dared break without committing grievous and unpardonable sin. So she
thought, and according to her thoughts she lived. What a strange world,
then, lay before her in the contemplated change that was about to take
place in the even tenor of her existence! A world of intrigue and
folly--a world of infidelity and falsehood!--how would she meet it? It
was a question she never asked herself--she thought London a sort of
magnified Christiania, or at best, the Provencal town of Arles on a
larger scale. She had heard her father speak of it, but only in a vague
way, and she had been able to form no just idea even to herself of the
enormous metropolis crowded to excess with its glad and sorrowful, busy
and idle, rich and poor millions. England itself floated before her
fancy as a green, fertile, embowered island where Shakespeare had
lived--and it delighted her to know that her future home, Errington
Manor, was situated in Warwickshire, Shakespeare's county. Of the
society that awaited her she had no notion,--she was prepared to "keep
house" for her husband in a very simple way--to spin his household
linen, to spare him all trouble and expense, and to devote herself body
and soul to his service. As may be well imagined, the pictures she drew
of her future married life, as she sat and span with Britta on that
peaceful afternoon, were widely different to the destined reality that
every day approached her more nearly.

Meantime, while the two girls were at home and undisturbed in the quiet
farm house, the mountaineering party, headed by Sigurd, were well on
their way towards the great Fall of Njedegorze. They had made a toilsome
ascent of the hills by the side of the Alten river--they had climbed
over craggy boulders and slippery rocks, sometimes wading knee-deep in
the stream, or pausing to rest and watch the salmon leap and turn
glittering somersaults in the air close above the diamond-clear
water,--and they had beguiled their fatigue with songs and laughter, and
the telling of fantastic legends and stories in which Sigurd had shone
at his best--indeed, this unhappy being was in a singularly clear a