vain nature required that she should be something to be proud of:  but she was forced to acknowledge in her own heart with despair that she had been blinded by her love for him, that his nature was absolutely deficient in constancy and truth, and in every quality which she had once persuaded herself to see in him.  She knew the secret about this man, so brilliant before the eyes of the world—­that he was not a man.  He lived and moved before her now like a defaced ideal, to which she was tied—­to the end of her life.  The bitterness of disappointment rankled in her mind, and was all the more poignant that she had to keep it shut up within herself and had no one to confide in.  Her life had become a desert, and at the very moment when her husband would be making a brilliant little speech that called forth applause all round the table, she would seem to hear nothing but a rattle of emptiness.  She always protested to her parents, when they could not understand why she looked so pale, that she was perfectly happy; and they had no reason to think otherwise, for she seemed to be well cared for in every respect.  The only real interest which she possessed now in life was her son Frederick; but she brought him up with the utmost possible strictness, for she fancied she detected his father’s nature over again in him.

She had always retained her warm interest in Elizabeth, and the messages which she had received from her from time to time had always given her pleasure.  She had never felt so attracted towards any one since as she had been to that girl; and now after her great disappointment, Elizabeth’s features, so full of character and expression, were constantly before her.  She had seen her sometimes in Arendal, and thought she knew the reason why Elizabeth always seemed to avoid meeting her; for she had found once, by chance, among some old letters in one of her husband’s drawers, the note which Elizabeth had written to him.

It had been no shock to her.  By that time she had come to know his volatile nature, and had given up all hope of ever being more to him than another would be.

On the occasions when she had caught a glimpse of the pilot’s wife in the street, she had looked searchingly into her face to try and satisfy herself whether she looked happy.  But she had not been able to do so; there seemed to be something on Elizabeth’s mind.  And taking this impression in connection with what she heard of the pilot, of his hardness and uncompanionable temper, she thought that it was clear enough that Elizabeth too, was unhappy in her married life, and longed to have a talk with her, to know whether she herself was not the more unhappy of the two.

Nor had Fru Beck’s uncommon pallor escaped Elizabeth’s notice, and she also longed to have a talk again with her friend of former days; but Beck’s house was for many reasons impossible ground for her.  As she was standing one day with Gjert on the quay, about to start for home, Fru Beck passed a little way off, leaning on her husband’s arm, and looked back with an expression so sad, and with eyes that seemed to linger so longingly, as if she had something she wanted to say, or to confide, that they nodded involuntarily to one another.