The day after Christmas, when the peasant brides came, five or six of them, to be dressed by Madame Moreus and her daughters, when they were adorned with wreaths of myrtle, and high crowns of silk, and glass beads, with gorgeous silk sashes and bunches of artificial roses, and skirts edged with garlands of taffeta flowers, she stayed up in her room to avoid seeing how they were being decked out in Love’s honor. But she knew Love’s misdeeds, and of them she could tell. She wondered that he dared to show himself on earth, that he was not frightened away by the moans of the forsaken, by the curses of those of whom he had made criminals, by the lamentations of those whom he had thrown into hateful chains. She wondered that his wings could bear him so easily and lightly, that he did not, weighed down by pain and shame, sink into nameless depths. No, of course she had been young, she like others, but she had never loved. She had never let herself be tempted by dancing and caresses. Her mother’s guitar hung dusty and unstrung in the attic; she never struck it to sentimental love-ditties. Her mother’s rose bushes stood in her window. She gave them scarcely any water. She did not love flowers, those children of love. Spiders played among the branches, and the buds never opened. There came a time when the Svartsjö congregation had an organ put into their church. It was the summer before the year when the pensioners reigned. A young organ-builder came there. He too became a boarder at Madame Moreus’. That the young organ-builder was a master of his profession may be a matter of doubt. But he was a gay young blade, with sunshine in his eyes. He had a friendly word for every one, for rich and poor, for old and young. When he came home from his work in the evening, he held Madame Moreus’ skeins, and worked at the side of young girls in the rose-garden. Then he declaimed “Axel” and sang “Frithiof.” He picked up Mamselle Marie’s ball of thread as often as she dropped it, and put her clock to rights. He never left any ball until he had danced with everybody, from the oldest woman to the youngest girl, and if an adversity befell him, he sat himself down by the side of the first woman he met and made her his _confidante_. He was such a man as women create in their dreams! It could not be said of him that he spoke of love to any one. But when he had lived a few weeks in Madame Moreus’ gable-room, all the girls were in love with him, and poor Mamselle Marie knew that she had prayed her prayers in vain. That was a time of sorrow and a time of joy. In the evening a pale dreamer often sat in the lilac arbor, and up in Mamselle Marie’s little room the newly strung guitar twanged to old love-songs, which she had learned from her mother.