"
"And you understood nothing besides?" Mogens asked softly and
seriously.
"No," she whispered, looked quickly at him, dropped the glance, and
grew red, "not then."
"Not then," Mogens repeated softly and kneeled down before her, "but
now, Thora?" She bent down toward him, gave him one of her hands, and
covered her eyes with the other and wept. Mogens pressed the hand
against his breast, as he rose; she lifted her head, and he kissed her
on the forehead. She looked up at him with radiant, moist eyes, smiled
and whispered: "Heaven be praised!"
Mogens stayed another week. The arrangement was that the wedding was
to take place in midsummer. Then he left, and winter came with dark
days, long nights, and a snowstorm of letters.
* * *
All the windows of the manor-house were lighted, leaves and flowers
were above every door, friends and acquaintances in a dense crowd
stood on the large stone stairway, all looking out into the dusk.--
Mogens had driven off with his bride.
The carriage rumbled and rumbled. The closed windows rattled. Thora
sat and looked out of one of them, at the ditch of the highway, at the
smith's hill where primroses blossomed in spring, at Bertel Nielsen's
huge elderberry bushes, at the mill and the miller's geese, and the
hill of Dalum where not many years ago she and William slid down on
sleighs, at the Dalum meadows, at the long, unnatural shadows of the
horses that rushed over the gravel-heaps, over the turf-pits and
rye-field.
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