erstand it," replied the senator.

Again Jan lay down on the bed and turned his face to the wall.

What did he care for the hut and all that? What was the good of his
going on living, when his little girl was not coming back?

THE DREAM BEGINS

The first few weeks after the senator's call Jan was unable to do a
stroke of work: he just lay abed and grieved. Every morning he rose
and put on his clothes, intending to go to his work; but before he
was outside the door he felt so weak and weary that all he could do
was to go back to bed.

Katrina tried to be patient with Jan, for she understood that
pining, like any other sickness, had to run its course. Yet she
could not help wondering how long it would be before Jan's intense
yearning for Glory Goldie subsided. "Perhaps he'll be lying round
like this till Christmas!" she thought. "Or possibly the whole
winter?"

And this might have been the case, too, had not the old seine-maker
dropped in at Ruffluck one evening and been asked to stay for
coffee.

The seine-maker, like most persons whose thoughts are far away and
who do not keep in touch with what happens immediately about them,
was always taciturn. But when his coffee had been poured and he had
emptied it into his saucer, to let it cool, it struck him that he
ought to say something.

"To-day there's bound to be a letter from Glory Goldie," he said.
"I feel it in my bones."

"We had greetings from her only a fortnight ago in her letter to
the senator," Katrina reminded him.

The seine-maker blew into his saucer a couple of times before
saying anything more. Whereupon he again found it expedient to
bridge a long silence with a word or so.

"Maybe some blessing has come to the girl, and it has given her
something to write about."

"What kind of blessing might that be?" scouted Katrina. "When
you've got to drudge as a servant, one day is as humdrum as
another."

The seine-maker bit off a corner of a sugar-lump and gulped his
coffee. When he had finished an appalling stillness fell upon the
room.

"It might be that Glory Goldie met some person in the street," he
blurted out, his half-dead eyes vacantly staring at space. He
seemed not to know what he was saying.

Katrina did not think it necessary to respond; so replenished his
cup without speaking.

"Maybe the person she met was an old lady who had difficulty in
walking," the seine-maker went on in the same offhand manner, "and
maybe she stumbled an