"Good God! Ragni!" he exclaimed. She answered not a word, it seemed to her a trifling matter, engrossed as she was in her own grief. Again he took her and drew her close to him, then she said: "Oh, how unhappy I am!"--and that was really the only thing she said all the time she sat there. He could answer nothing but what would have sounded very stupid. He tried to say something and took refuge in caresses; but she got up and drew herself away--she wished to leave him. He felt he was not able to keep her any longer, but took her to the door. Before she opened it, she turned to him with a look of sorrowing devotion, like one in death-agony. He put out the lamp and she slipped out. But just as she shut the door behind her, a faint ray of light fell on her, it came from the little recess that led into the aunt's room; at that very moment the door opened and her aunt stood before her--looking to Ragni's fevered imagination like a huge whale on two legs. Of course, the aunt had heard Ragni crying in her lodger's room, and had seen at a glance how to account for Ragni's strange manner the last few days. So she had kept guard outside her own door, and just as Ragni was leaving Kallem's room, she gave a push to her door, thereby causing the light to fall full on her. Her aunt put out her hand; that was as much as to say: "This way, my lady!" And Ragni obeyed, and her aunt let her pass in before her. She was not alone. There stood a sofa against the wall nearest to the room she had just quitted; a tall, fair man with a mild and gentle face rose up from the sofa-corner; it was Ole Tuft. It was he who had first heard her cry and had been outside their door. Ragni sank down onto a chair between the sofa and the door. The next day she was in bed. But before Kallem went out he got a note from her in which she told him that her aunt had heard her crying in his room, and so had Tuft; he had also been at their door. There was nothing more in the note; but low down at the bottom of the page the almost illegible words: "Never more." In the midst of all the fright which now came over him, too, Kallem thought those poor little words "never more" so eloquent, that they caused his eyes to fill with tears, but his heart to take fresh courage. Something must be done now! Her aunt and Ole Tuft had evidently been cross-questioning her. He had heard nothing of it, so it must either have been done very quietly or else not in that room at all. Poor, poor Ragni! He was full of the greatest compassion, of furious indignation, of fear, revenge, boundless love, disappointment, rage!