How she longed to get up and rush from the house! How she loathed that woman who stood flirting with the empty-headed man standing at her side! If it had not been for her perfidy how different all might now be! “I can’t help hating her!” thought poor Sigrid. “She has ruined Frithiof’s life, and now in one moment has undone the work of months. She brought about my father’s failure; if she had been true we should not now be toiling to pay off these terrible debts—hundreds of homes in Bergen would have been saved from a cruel loss—and he—my father—he might have been alive and well! How can I help hating her?” At that moment Blanche happened to catch sight of them. The color deepened in her cheeks. “Have they come to that?” she thought. “Oh, poor things! How sorry I am for them! Papa told me Herr Falck had failed; but to have sunk so low! Well, since they lost all their money it was a mercy that all was over between us. And yet, if I had been true to him—” Her companion wondered what made her so silent all at once. But in truth poor Blanche might well be silent, for into her mind there flashed a dreadful vision of past sins; standing there in the ball-room in her gay satin dress and glittering diamonds, there had come to her, almost for the first time, a sense of responsibility for the evil she had wrought. It was not Frithiof’s life alone that she had rendered miserable. She had sinned far more deeply against her husband, and though in a sort of bravado she tried to persuade herself that she cared for nothing, and accepted the invitations sent her by the people who would still receive her at their houses, she was all the time most wretched. So strangely had good and evil tendencies been mingled in her nature that she caught herself wondering sometimes whether she really was one woman; she had her refined side and her vulgar side; she could be one day tender-hearted and penitent, and the next day a hard woman of the world; she could at one time be the Blanche of that light-hearted Norwegian holiday, and at another the Lady Romiaux of notoriety. “How extraordinary that I should chance to meet my Viking here!” she thought to herself. “How very much older he looks! How very much his face has altered! One would have thought that to come down in the world would have cowed him a little; but it seems somehow to have given him dignity. I positively feel afraid of him. I, who could once turn him round my finger—I, for whom he would have died! How ridiculous of me to be afraid! After all, I could soon get my old power over him if I chose to try. I will go and speak to them; it would be rude not to notice them in their new position, poor things.”