“Child, the end has now come! And with it gone love and love’s joy. He whom thou lovedst as if he had taught thee With wings to hover through space, He whom thou lovedst as if he had given thee Safety and home when the village was flooded, Is gone, who alone understood The key to the door of thy heart. “I ask but one thing of thee, O my beloved: ‘Lay not upon me the load of thy hate!’ That weakest of all things, the poor human heart, How can it live with the pang and the thought That it gave pain to another? “O my beloved, if thou wilt kill me, Use neither dagger nor poison nor rope! Say only you wish me to vanish From the green earth and the kingdom of life, And I shall sink to my grave. “From thee came life of life; thou gavest me love, And now thou recallest thy gift, I know it too well. But do not give me thy hate! I still have love of living! Oh, remember that; But under a load of hate I have but to die.” CHAPTER X THE YOUNG COUNTESS The young countess sleeps till ten o’clock in the morning, and wants fresh bread on the breakfast-table every day. The young countess embroiders, and reads poetry. She knows nothing of weaving and cooking. The young countess is spoiled. But the young countess is gay, and lets her joyousness shine on all and everything. One is so glad to forgive her the long morning sleep and the fresh bread, for she squanders kindness on the poor and is friendly to every one. The young countess’s father is a Swedish nobleman, who has lived in Italy all his life, retained there by the loveliness of the land and by one of that lovely land’s beautiful daughters. When Count Henrik Dohna travelled in Italy he had been received in this nobleman’s house, made the acquaintance of his daughters, married one of them, and brought her with him to Sweden. She, who had always spoken Swedish and had been brought up to love everything Swedish, is happy in the land of the bear. She whirls so merrily in the long dance of pleasure, on Löfven’s shores, that one could well believe she had always lived there. Little she understands what it means to be a countess. There is no state, no stiffness, no condescending dignity in that young, joyous creature. It was the old men who liked the young countess best. It was wonderful, what a success she had with old men. When they had seen her at a ball, one could be sure that all of them, the judge at Munkerud and the clergyman at Bro and Melchior Sinclair and the captain at Berga, would tell their wives in the greatest confidence that if they had met the young countess thirty or forty years ago— “Yes, then she was not born,” say the old ladies. And the next time they meet, they joke with the young countess, because she wins the old men’s hearts from them.