did. Anna Wachenfeldt had been the favourite sister-in-law of Fru Lagerlöf, who had looked up to her with genuine admiration. Anna had been the one to welcome her most heartily into the family, and she could never forgive Colour-Sergeant von Wachenfeldt for making this beloved woman unhappy.
Mamselle Lovisa, as a child, had made long visits at Valsäter, the home of the Wachenfeldts, and knew more about her sister's troubles than any of them. She could never hear the name Wachenfeldt without thinking of a certain morning when a couple of strange men came to Valsäter and led from the barn the two best cows. Her sister had run out and asked them what they were doing there, and they had coolly answered that the Sergeant the night before had staked the cows in a game with their master, and lost. Mamselle Lovisa saw her sister as it were before her, and remembered how distressed she had been over this. "He will never come to his senses," she had said, "until he has made an end of me."
However, Mamselle Lovisa was the first to think of her duties as hostess. She got up from the sewing table, where she had been embroidering and betimes taking little peeps into a novel that lay open in her sewing basket, and went to the kitchen door.
"Maja dear," she called to the housekeeper, apologetically, "now we have Wachenfeldt here again!"
"I can't understand why that fellow, who was so mean to his wife, is allowed to come here at every
