“But if he really loved her, why did he not remember that he could not give her a worse gift than his love? He, one of the world’s outcasts, what did he want, what did he think of when he walked at the side of the count’s daughter? What did the dismissed clergyman think when she confided to him her gentle dreams? What did he want, who had been a drunkard, and would be again when he got the chance, at the side of her who dreamed of a bridegroom in heaven? Why did he not fly far, far away from her? Would it not have been better for him to wander begging and stealing about the land than to walk under the silent pines and again be good, gentle, virtuous, when it could not change the life he had led, nor make it right that Ebba Dohna should love him? “Do not think that he looked like a drunkard, with livid cheeks and red eyes. He was always a splendid man, handsome and unbroken in soul and body. He had the bearing of a king and a body of steel, which was not hurt by the wildest life.” “Is he still living?” asks the countess. “Oh, no, he must be dead now. All that happened so long ago.” There is something in Anna Stjärnhök which begins to tremble at what she is doing. She begins to think that she will never tell the countess who the man is of whom she speaks; that she will let her believe that he is dead. “At that time he was still young;” and she begins her story again. “The joy of living was kindled in him. He had the gift of eloquence, and a fiery, impulsive heart. “One evening he spoke to Ebba Dohna of love. She did not answer; she only told him what her grandmother had told her that winter evening, and described to him the land of her dreams. Then she exacted a promise from him. She made him swear that he would be a proclaimer of the word of God; one of those who would prepare the way for the Lord, so that his coming might be hastened. “What could he do? He was a dismissed clergyman, and no way was so closed to him as that on which she wanted him to enter. But he did not dare to tell her the truth. He did not have the heart to grieve that gentle child whom he loved. He promised everything she wished. “After that few words were needed. It went without saying that some day she should be his wife. It was not a love of kisses and caresses. He hardly dared come near her. She was as sensitive as a fragile flower. But her brown eyes were sometimes raised from the ground to seek his. On moonlit evenings, when they sat on the veranda, she would creep close to him, and then he would kiss her hair without her noticing it. “But you understand that his sin was in his forgetting both the past and the future. That he was poor and humble he could forget; but he ought always to have remembered that a day must come when in her soul love would rise against love, earth against heaven, when she would be obliged to choose between him and the glorious Lord of the kingdom of the thousand years. And she was not one who could endure such a struggle.