those five years; but I won’t say that it is your fault, neither make myself out better than I am, for I have confidence in you, Elizabeth, if I have not the same reliance upon myself, and I can’t help it if I haven’t.  When you read this letter, Elizabeth, you must remember the poor sailor who is frozen up here, and not forget it afterwards till we meet again, which I would give half my life-blood or more for, if it was any use, as I am consuming away with impatience up here—­I have such a longing to see you again.  And now, farewell from my heart, and God bless you.  I will trust you and hope in you till my last hour, come what may.  Farewell, my dearest girl, with fond love from

“SALVE KRISTIANSEN.”

This letter cost Elizabeth many a tear.  She sat over it in the evenings before she went to bed, and felt so poignantly that it was she who had brought him to this—­that he could not trust her; for she understood but too well what lay between the lines.  “If I could only be with him,” she thought, and she longed to be able to send him an answer; but she had never learnt properly how to write or to compose a letter.

With some difficulty, however, and after several ineffectual attempts, she managed to put two lines together which she remembered from the Catechism:—­

“To my lover Salve Kristiansen—­

“You shall put your trust in God, and after Him, in me before all
others, who careth for you in all things, and have faith in me.  That is
the truth from your ever-unforgetting
                                            “ELIZABETH RAKLEV. 
And in the spring,
                                       “ELIZABETH KRISTIANSEN.”

She folded the letter, and got one of Garvloit’s sons to write the address; but, that it might be certain to go, she went with it herself to the post-office.

Salve received it one day with great surprise.  He guessed from whom it came, and delayed opening it in the fear that it might contain a breaking off of their engagement occasioned by his own letter:  he remembered that first morning in Amsterdam.  What was his joy, then, when he found what the contents actually were; he seemed to have the thing now in black-and-white.  He put the letter carefully back into his pocket-book every time after reading it, and for a while was quite another man.  Still, it was high time that the ice should begin to break up, and that he should find occupation for his thoughts in work; he had begun to be afraid to be alone with them.

His first voyage was to Puermurende, and thence to Amsterdam; and they determined to be married there and then, although he had but four days to stay while the brig was loading in Puermurende.  Out of consideration for the Garvloits, whom they wished to spare the expense of the wedding as much as possible, they insisted that they would be married on the day they were to leave for Puermurende.