“Yes; a marriage between the two houses would be a great thing, it would make this new idea unlikely if not altogether impossible. I am thankful that there seems now some chance of it. Let the two meet naturally and learn to know each other. I will not say a word to Frithiof, it would only do harm; but to you, Sigrid, I confess that my heart is set on this plan. If I could for one moment make you see the future as I see it, you would feel with me how important the matter is.” At this moment Frithiof himself entered, and the conversation was abruptly ended. “Well, have you decided?” he asked, in his eager, boyish way. “Is it to be Ulvik or Balholm? What! You were not even talking about that. Oh, I know what it was then. Sigrid was deep in the discussion of to-morrow’s dinner. I will tell you what to do, abolish the romekolle, and let us be English to the backbone. Now I think of it, Mr. Morgan is not unlike a walking sirloin with a plum-pudding head. There is your bill of fare, so waste no more time.” The brother and sister went off together, laughing and talking; but when the door closed behind them the master of the house buried his face in his hands and for many minutes sat motionless. What troubled thoughts, what wavering anxieties filled his mind, Sigrid little guessed. It was, after all, a mere surface difficulty of which he had spoken; of the real strain which was killing him by inches he could not say a word to any mortal being, though now in his great misery he instinctively prayed. “My poor children!” he groaned. “Oh, God spare them from this shame and ruin which haunts me. I have tried to be upright and prudent,—it was only this once that I was rash. Give me success for their sakes, O God! The selfish and unscrupulous flourish on all sides. Give me this one success. Let me not blight their whole lives.” But the next day, when he went forward to greet his English guests, it would have been difficult to recognize him as the burdened, careworn man from whose lips had been wrung that confession and that prayer. All his natural courtesy and brightness had returned to him; if he thought of his business at all he thought of it in the most sanguine way possible, and the Morgans saw in him only an older edition of Frithiof, and wondered how he had managed to preserve such buoyant spirits in the cares and uncertainties of mercantile life. The two o’clock dinner passed off well; Sigrid, who was a clever little housekeeper, had scouted Frithiof’s suggestion as to the roast beef and plum-pudding, and had carefully devised a thoroughly Norwegian repast. “For I thought,” she explained afterwards to Blanche, when the two girls had made friends, “that if I went to England I should wish to see your home life just exactly as it really is, and so I have ordered the sort of dinner we should naturally have, and did not, as Frithiof advised, leave out the romekolle.”