“No!” she answered, so abruptly that he flushed crimson, and then, cooling off, fell back into the reflections that, for years, had weighed on him, and which her unexpected reply had roused again.
That she possessed a strong individuality he had never doubted from the time when she was a child, and he used to see her marching about singing at the head of the town’s boy-companies. But the longer he taught her the less he comprehended the nature of her endowments. Her every emotion betokened their existence; all that she thought, all that she desired, was revealed by mind and body at once with ardent intensity, and over all were sparkling flashes of beauty. But put into words, and especially into writing, it became mere childishness. She seemed to be pure fantasy; yet he, to be sure, ascribed this chiefly to restlessness. She was very industrious, but her studies aimed less at learning than at advancing; what might be on the next page was most prominent in her mind. She had deep religious feeling, but as the priest expressed himself, “no foundation for a religious life,” and Ödegaard felt troubled about her. He stood again at the starting-point, his thoughts involuntarily bearing him to the flagstone where he had assumed the charge of her,
