(I have been again compelled to lay aside my pen for many days. Now I must try if I can finish.) Let not the wrong I did to you, and thereby, alas, to many both in the present and in the future, be used by you as an excuse for never making further progress! You can, if you will, give free scope to whatever power there is within you, if not in one way, in another. And do this now; do it, also, because I implore you! You can make the burden of my fault less heavy for my thoughts, now in the last hours of my life. Aye, while I write this it grows lighter. The kindness you, in spite of all, surely cherish toward me (I feel it!) sends me a greeting. You will, so far as you can, rescue my life's work, where it failed to complete its efforts; you will build upon and improve, Magnhild! You will, moreover, accept this request as a consolation? * * * * * (I could proceed no farther. But to-day I am better.) If what I have written helps to open the world once more to you, so that you can enter in and take hold of life's duties; aye, if all that you have either neglected or only half performed can come to attain the rank of links in life's problem, and thus become dear to you,--then it will do me good; remember this! Farewell! Ah, yes, farewell! I have other letters to write, and cannot do much. Farewell! HANS TANDE. * * * * * (Eight days later.) I copy in this letter to you the following lines from a letter to another:-- "It is not true that love is for every one the portal to life. Perchance it is not so for even half of those who attain _real life_. "There are many whose lives are ruined by the loss of love, or by sacrificing everything to love. With some of them, perhaps, it could not have been otherwise (people are so different, circumstances excuse so much); but those whose existences I have seen thus blighted could unconditionally have gained the mastery over self and in the effort acquired a new power. Encouraged, however, by a class of literature and art whose short-sightedness proceeds from a maimed will, they neglected all attempts at gaining strength." CHAPTER XI. Magnhild and Rönnaug came arm in arm out of the wood where Rönnaug had finally been obliged to seek her friend, where so many confidences had been made, so much discussed and considered. They emerged into the open plain. How blue the haze about the mountains! And this was the frame for the pine forest, the surrounding heather, and the plain with Miss Roland and the child. The latter were sitting on blue and red rugs near the carriage. From this foreground the mother's eye wandered away more musingly than ever, and gained even stronger impressions of outline, light, color.