wall above her bed. Noticing it, she moved her hand. She lay down on the bed and mechanically pushed off her shoes with her feet, and put her hand under the cover to prevent the blood from making a mess.
She did not think; she was not afraid; she felt only that she was surrendering to the inevitable. The pain of the cut was not great—only sharp and distinct, and concentrated on one spot.
After a while a strange, unknown sensation took hold of her, an agony that grew and grew—not a fear of anything in particular, but the feeling of an ache round her heart and sickness, as it were. She opened her eyes, but black specks flickered before her sight and she could not breathe. The room seemed to crumble down on her. She tumbled out of bed, tore the door open, rushed up the stairs to the roof, and collapsed on the last step.
Helge had met Gunnar Heggen as he came out of the front door. They had looked at each other, both touching their hats, and passed on without a word.
That meeting had sobered Helge. After the intoxication of the night his mood instantly changed to the other extreme, and what he had experienced seemed to him incredible, inconceivable, and monstrous.
He had dreamt of this meeting with her all these years. She, the queen of his dreams, had scarcely spoken to him, at first sitting quiet and cold and then suddenly throwing herself into his arms, wild, mad, without saying a word. It struck him now that she had said nothing—nothing at all to his words of love in the night. A strange, apalling woman, his Jenny. He realized suddenly that she had never been his.
Helge walked about in the quiet streets, up and down the Corso. He tried to think of her as she had been when they were engaged, to separate the dreams from the reality, but he could not form a clear picture of her, and he realized that he
