“What is a pensioner’s love, what is a pensioner’s faith?—one sweetheart to-day, another to-morrow, one in the east, another in the west. Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low; one day a count’s daughter, the next day a beggar girl. Nothing on earth is so capacious as his heart. But alas, alas for her who loves a pensioner. She must seek him out where he lies drunk at the wayside. She must silently look on while he at the card-table plays away the home of her childhood. She must bear to have him hang about other women. Oh, Elizabeth, if a pensioner asks an honorable woman for a dance she ought to refuse it to him; if he gives her a bunch of flowers she ought to throw the flowers on the ground and trample on them; if she loves him she ought rather to die than to marry him. There was one among the pensioners who was a dismissed priest; he had lost his vestments for drunkenness. He was drunk in the church. He drank up the communion wine. Have you ever heard of him?” “No.” “After he had been dismissed he wandered about the country as a beggar. He drank like a madman. He would steal to get brandy.” “What is his name?” “He is no longer at Ekeby. The major’s wife got hold of him, gave him clothes, and persuaded your mother-in-law, Countess Dohna, to make him tutor to your husband, young Count Henrik.” “A dismissed priest!” “Oh, he was a young, powerful man, of good intelligence. There was no harm in him, if he only did not drink. Countess Märta was not particular. It amused her to quarrel with the neighboring clergymen. Still, she ordered him to say nothing of his past life to her children. For then her son would have lost respect for him, and her daughter would not have endured him, for she was a saint. “So he came here to Borg. He always sat just inside the door, on the very edge of his chair, never said a word at the table, and fled out into the park when any visitors came. “But there in the lonely walks he used to meet young Ebba Dohna. She was not one who loved the noisy feasts which resounded in the halls at Borg after the countess became a widow. She was so gentle, so shy. She was still, although she was seventeen, nothing but a tender child; but she was very lovely, with her brown eyes, and the faint, delicate color in her cheeks. Her thin, slender body bent forward. Her little hand would creep into yours with a shy pressure. Her little mouth was the most silent of mouths and the most serious. Ah, her voice, her sweet little voice, which pronounced the words so slowly and so well, but never rang with the freshness and warmth of youth,—its feeble tones were like a weary musician’s last chord. “She was not as others. Her foot trod so lightly, so softly, as if she were a frightened fugitive. She kept her eyelids lowered in order not to be disturbed in her contemplation of the visions of her soul. It had turned from the earth when she was but a child.