The change to Rowan Tree House seemed to work wonders to him. The house had always charmed him, and the recollection of the first time he had entered it, using it as a shelter from the storm of life, much as Roy and Cecil had used his father’s house as a shelter from the drenching rain of Bergen, returned to him again and again through the quiet weeks that followed. The past year looked now to him like a nightmare to a man who was awakened in broad daylight. It seemed to him that he was lying at the threshold of a new life, worn and tired with the old life, it was true, yet with a gradually increasing interest in what lay beyond, and a perception that there were many things of which he had as yet but the very faintest notion. Sigrid told him all the details of her life in Norway since they had last seen each other, of her refusal of Torvald Lundgren, of her relations with her aunt, of the early morning on Hjerkinshö. And her story touched him. When, stirred by all that had happened into unwonted earnestness, she owned to him that after that morning on the mountain everything had seemed different, he did not, as he would once have done, laughingly change the subject, or say that religion was all very well for women. “It was just as if I had worn a crape veil all my life,” she said, looking up from her work for a moment with those clear, blue, practical eyes of hers. “And up there on the mountain it seemed as if some one had lifted it quite away.” Her words stirred within him an uneasy sense of loss, a vague desire, which he had once or twice felt before. He was quite silent for some time, lying back idly in his chair and watching her as she worked. “Sigrid!” he said at last, with a suppressed eagerness in his voice, “Sigrid, you wont go back again to Norway and leave me?” “No, dear, I will never leave you,” she said warmly. “I will try to find some sort of work. To-night I mean to talk to Mr. Boniface about it. Surely in this huge place there must be something I can do.” “It is its very hugeness that makes one despair,” said Frithiof. “Good God! what I went through last autumn! And there are thousands in the same plight, thousands who would work if only they could meet with employment.” “Discussing the vexed question of the unemployed?” said Mr. Boniface, entering the room in time to hear this last remark. “Yes,” said Sigrid, smiling. “Though I’m a wretched foreigner come to swell their number. But what can be the cause of such distress?” “I think it is this,” said Mr. Boniface, “population goes on increasing, but practical Christianity does not increase at the same rate.” “Are you what they call a Christian Socialist?” asked Sigrid.