"If she should sometime meet me, and know that I was, am, and have been unmarried, that meanwhile we have both become old and gray,--can one think of anything more sad? It is enough to make the heart cease beating! But suppose, too, that to-morrow she finds out that she has been deceived: she has once written, 'I was mistaken,' and cannot, as a true woman, write it again, unless she first heard from me, and learned how I longed--and so I am cut off from her, as if I lived in the moon. More, more! for I can meet her upon the street and touch her arm without surmising it. It is insupportable! Our time has mail, steamboats, railroads, telegraphs: to me these do not exist; for of what use are they altogether, when one knows not where to search." A thought came suddenly, like a meteor in the dark: advertise. What family in Copenhagen did not the Address Paper reach? He would put in an advertisement,--but how? "Fritz Bagger is not married."--No: that was too plain.--"F. B. is not married."--No: that was not plain enough. As he could find no successful use for his own name, it flashed into his mind to use hers,--geb--; and although it was painful to him to publish this, to him, almost sacred syllable for profane eyes to gaze upon, yet it comforted him, that only one, she herself, would understand it. Yet he hesitated. But one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs; and although the heart's finest fibres ache at the thought of sending a message to a fairy through the Address Paper, yet one yields to this rather than lose the fairy. At last, after numerous efforts he stopped at this: "--geb--! It is a mistake: he waits only for--geb--." It appeared to him to contain the approach to a happy result, and tired out by emotion he fell asleep on his sofa. Some days after came a new letter with the dear handwriting: its contents were: "Well! appear eight days from to-day at Mrs. Canuteson's, to congratulate her upon her birthday." This was sunshine after thunder; this was hope's rainbow which arched itself up to heaven from the earth, yet wet with tears. "And so she belongs to good society," said the Counsellor of Justice, without noticing how by these words he discovered to himself that a doubt or suspicion had lain until now behind his ecstasy. "But," he added, "consequently, it is my own friends who have spread the rumor of my marriage. Friends indeed! A wife is a man's only friend. It is hard, suicidal, to remain a bachelor."