The afternoon was not so clear as the morning had been, yet it had a beauty of its own which appealed to Frithiof very strongly. The blue sky had changed to a soft pearly gray, all round him rose grave, majestic mountains, their summits clear against the pale background, but wreaths of white mist clinging about their sides in fantastic twists and curves which bridged over huge yawning chasms and seemed to join the valley into a great amphitheater. The stern gray and purple rocks looked hardly real, so softened were they by the luminous summer haze. Here and there the white snow gleamed coldly in long deep crevices, or in broad clefts where from year’s end to year’s end it remained unmelted by sun or rain. On each side of the road there was a wilderness of birch and fir and juniper bushes, while in the far distance could be heard the Mongefos with its ceaseless sound of many waters, repeated on either hand by the smaller waterfalls. Other sound there was none save the faint tinkle of cowbells or the rare song of the little black and white wagtails, which seemed the only birds in the valley.

Suddenly he perceived a little further along the road a slim figure leaning against the fence, the folds of a blue dress, the gleam of light-brown hair under a sealskin traveling cap. His heart began to beat fast, he strode on more quickly, and Cecil, hearing footsteps, looked up.

“I had finished my letter and thought I would come out to explore a little,” she said, as he joined her. “You have come back?”

“Yes,” he said, “I have come back to you.”

She glanced at him questioningly, startled by his tone, but before his eager look her eyelids dropped, and a soft glow of color suffused her face.

“Cecil,” he said, “do you remember what you said years ago about men who worked hard to make their fortune and then retired and were miserable because they had nothing to do?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “I remember it very well, and have often seen instances of it.”

“I am like that now,” he continued. “My work seems over, and I stand at the threshold of a new life. It was you who saved me from ruin in my old life—will you be my helper now?”

“Do you think I really could help?” she said wistfully.

He looked at her gentle eyes, at her pure, womanly face, and he knew that his life was in her hands.

“I do not know,” he said gravely. “It depends on whether you could love me—whether you will let me speak of my love for you.”

Then, as he paused, partly because his English words would not come very readily, partly in hope of some sign of encouragement from her, she turned to him with a face which shone with heavenly light.

“There must never be any secrets between us,” she said, speaking quite simply and directly. “I have loved you ever since you first came to us—years ago.”

It was nothing to Frithiof that they were standing at the side of the king’s highway—he had lost all sense of time and place—the world only contained for him the woman who loved him—the woman who let him clasp her in his strong arm—let him press her sweet face to his.

And still from the distance came the sound of many waters, and the faint tinkle of the cowbells, and the song of the little black and white birds. The grave gray mountains seemed like strong and kindly friends who sheltered them and shut them in from all intrusion of the outer world, but they were so entirely absorbed in each other that they had not a thought of anything else.

“With you I shall have courage to begin life afresh,” he said, after a time. “To have the right to love you—to be always with you—that will be everything to me.”

And then as he thought of her true-hearted confession, he tried to understand a little better the unseen ordering of his life, and he loved to think that those weary years had been wasted neither on him nor on Cecil herself. He could not for one moment doubt that her pure, unselfish love had again and again shielded him from evil, that all through his English life, with its hard struggles and bitter sufferings, her love had in some unknown way been his safeguard, and that his life, crippled by the faithlessness of a woman, had by a woman also been redeemed. All his old morbid craving for death had gone; he eagerly desired a long life, that he might live with her, work for her, shield her from care, fill up, to the best of his power, what was incomplete in her life.

“I shall have a postscript to add to my letter,” said Cecil presently, looking up at him with the radiant smile which he so loved to see on her lips. “What a very feminine one it will be! We say, you know, in England, that a woman’s postscript is the most important part of her letter.”

“Will your father and mother ever spare you to me?” said Frithiof.

“They will certainly welcome you as their son,” she replied.

“And Mr. and Mrs. Horner?” suggested Frithiof mischievously.

But at the thought of the consternation of her worthy cousins Cecil could do nothing but laugh.

“Never mind,” she said, “they have always disapproved of me as much as they have of you; they will perhaps say that it is, after all, a highly suitable arrangement!”

“I wonder whether Swanhild will say the same?” said Frithiof with a smile; “here she comes, hurrying home alone. Will you wait by the river and let me just tell her my good news?”

He walked along the road to meet his sister, who, spite of added years and inches, still retained much of her childlikeness.

“Why are you all alone?” he said.

“Oh, there is no fun,” said Swanhild. “When Roy and Sigrid are out on a holiday they are just like lovers, so I came back to you.”

“What will you say when I tell you that I am betrothed,” he said teasingly.

She looked up in his face with some alarm.

“You are only making fun of me,” she protested.

“On the contrary, I am stating the most serious of facts. Come, I want your congratulations.”

“But who are you betrothed to?” asked Swanhild, bewildered. “Can it be to Madale? And, oh dear, what a horrid time to choose for it—you will be just no good at all. I really do think you might have waited till the end of the tour.”

“It might possibly have been managed if you had spoken sooner,” said Frithiof, with mock gravity, “but you come too late—the deed is done.”

“Well, I shall have Cecil to talk to, so after all it doesn’t much matter,” said Swanhild graciously.

“But, unfortunately, she also has become betrothed,” said Frithiof, watching the bewildered little face with keen pleasure, and seeing the light of perception suddenly dawn on it.

Swanhild caught his hand in hers.

“You don’t mean—” she began.

“Oh yes,” cried Frithiof, “but I do mean it very much indeed. Come,” and he hurried her down the grassy slope to the river. “I shall tell Cecil every word you have been saying.” Then, as she rose to meet them, he said with a laugh, “This selfish child thinks we might have put it off till the end of the tour for her special benefit.”

“No, no,” cried Swanhild, flying toward Cecil with outstretched arms. “I never knew it was to you he was betrothed—and you could never be that horrid, moony kind who are always sitting alone together in corners.”

At which ingenuous congratulations they all laughed so immoderately that Mons Horgheim the cat was roused from his afternoon nap on the steps of the station, and after a preliminary stretch strolled down toward the river to see what was the matter, and to bring the sobriety and accumulated wisdom of his fourteen years to bear upon the situation.

“Ah, well,” said Swanhild, with a comical gesture, “there is clearly nothing for me but, as they say in Italy, to stay at home and nurse the cat.”

And catching up the astonished Mons, she danced away, eager to be the first to tell the good news to Roy and Sigrid.

“It will be really very convenient,” she remarked, to the infinite amusement of her elders. “We shall not lose Frithiof at all; he will only have to move across to Rowan Tree House.”

And ultimately that was how matters arranged themselves, so that the house which had sheltered Frithiof in his time of trouble became his home in this time of his prosperity.

He had not rushed all at once into full light and complete manhood and lasting happiness. Very slowly, very gradually, the life that had been plunged in darkness had emerged into faint twilight as he had struggled to redeem his father’s name; then, by degrees, the brightness of dawn had increased, and, sometimes helped, sometimes hindered by the lives which had come into contact with his own, he had at length emerged into clearer light, till, after long waiting, the sun had indeed risen.

As Swanhild had prophesied, they were by no means selfish lovers, and, far from spoiling the tour, their happiness did much to add to its success.

Cecil hardly knew which part of it was most delightful to her, the return of Molde and the pilgrimage to the quaint little jeweler’s shop where they chose two plain gold betrothal rings such as are always used in Norway; or the merry journey to the Geiranger; or the quiet days at OldÖren, in that lovely valley with the river curving and bending its way between wooded banks, and the rampart of grand, craggy mountains with snowy peaks, her own special mountain, as Frithiof called Cecilienkrone, dominating all.

It was at OldÖren that she saw for the first time one of the prettiest sights in Norway—a country wedding. The charming bride, Pernilla, in her silver-gilt crown and bridal ornaments, had her heartiest sympathy, and Frithiof, happening to catch sight of the fiddler standing idly by the churchyard gate when the ceremony was over, brought him into the hotel and set every one dancing. Anna Rasmusen, the clever and charming manager of the inn, volunteered to try the spring dans with Halfstan, the guide. The hamlet was searched for dancers of the halling, and the women showed them the pretty jelster and the tretur.

By degrees all the population of the place crowded in as spectators, and soon Johannes and Pernilla, the bride and bridegroom, made their way through the throng, and, each carrying a decanter, approached the visitors, shook hands with them, and begged that they would drink their health. There was something strangely simple and charming about the whole thing. Such a scene could have been found in no other country save in grand, free old Norway, where false standards of worth are abolished, and where mutual respect and equal rights bind each to each in true brotherhood.

The day after the wedding they spent at the Brixdals glacier, rowing all together up the lake, but afterward separating, Frithiof and Cecil walking in advance of the others up the beautiful valley.

“There will soon be a high-road to this glacier,” said Frithiof, “but I am glad they are only beginning it now, and that we have this rough path.”

And Cecil was glad too. She liked the scramble and the little bit of climbing needed here and there; she loved to feel the strength and protection of Frithiof’s hand as he led her over the rocks and bowlders. At last, after a long walk, they reached a smooth, grassy oasis, shaded by silver birches and bordered by a river, beyond, the Brixdalsbrae gleamed white through the trees, with here and there exquisite shades of blue visible in the ice even at that distance.

“This is just like the Land of Beulah,” said Cecil, smiling, “and the glacier is the celestial city. How wonderful those broken pinnacles of ice are!”

“Look at these two little streams running side by side for so long and at last joining,” said Frithiof. “They are like our two lives. For so many years you have been to me as we should say fortrÖlig.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“It is untranslatable,” he said. “It is that in which one puts one’s trust and confidence, but more besides. It means exactly what you have always been to me.”

Cecil looked down at the little bunch of forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley—the Norwegian national flowers with which Frithiof loved to keep her supplied—and the remembrance of all that she had borne during these five years came back to her, and by contrast made the happy present yet sweeter.

“I think,” she said, “I should like Signor Donati to know of our happiness; he was the first who quite understood you.”

“Yes, I must write to him,” said Frithiof. “There is no man to whom I owe more.”

And thinking of the Italian’s life and character and of his own past, he grew silent.

“Do you know,” he said at length, “there is one thing I want you to do for me. I want you to give me back my regard for the Sogne once more. I want, on our way home, just to pass Balholm again.”

And so one day it happened that they found themselves on the well-remembered fjord, and coming up on deck when dinner was over, saw that already the familiar scenes of the Frithiof saga were coming into view.

“Look! look!” said Frithiof. “There, far in front of us is the Kvinnafos, looking like a thread of white on the dark rock; and over to the right is Framnaes!”

Cecil stood beside him on the upper deck, and gradually the scene unfolded. They saw the little wooded peninsula, the lovely mountains round the Fjaerlands fjord, Munkeggen itself, with much more snow than during their last visit, and then, once again, King Bele’s grave, and the scattered cottages, with their red-tiled roofs, and the familiar hotel, somewhat enlarged, yet recalling a hundred memories.

Gravely and thoughtfully Frithiof looked on the little hamlet and on Munkeggen. It was a picture that had been traced on his mind by pleasure and engraved by pain. Cecil drew a little nearer to him, and though no word passed between them, yet intuitively their thoughts turned to one who must ever be associated with those bright days spent in the house of Ole Kvikne long ago. There was no indignation in their thoughts of her, but there was pain, and pity, and hope, and the love which is at once the source and the outcome of forgiveness. They wondered much how matters stood with her out in the far-off southern seas, where she struggled on in a new life, which must always, to the very end, be shadowed by the old. And then Frithiof thought of his father, of his own youth, of the wonderful glamor and gladness that had been doomed so soon to pass into total eclipse, and feeling like some returned ghost, he glided close by the flagstaff, and the gray rocks, and the trees which had sheltered his farewell to Blanche. A strange and altogether indescribable feeling stole over him, but it was speedily dispelled. There was a link which happily bound his past to his present—a memory which nothing could spoil—on the quay he instantly perceived the well-remembered faces of the kindly landlord, Ole Kvikne, and his brother Knut.

“See!” she exclaimed with a smile, “there are the Kviknes looking not a day older! We must see if they remember us.”

Did they not remember? Of course they did! And what bowing and hand-shaking went on in the brief waiting time. They had heard of Frithiof, moreover, and knew how nobly he had redeemed his father’s name. They were enchanted at meeting him once more.

“Let me have the pleasure, Kvikne, to introduce to you my betrothed, who was also your guest long ago,” said Frithiof, taking Cecil’s hand and placing it in that of the landlord.

And the warm congratulations and hearty good wishes of Ole and Knut Kvikne were only cut short by the bell, which warned the travelers that they must hasten up the gangway.

“We shall come back,” said Frithiof. “Another summer we shall stay with you.”

“Yes,” said Cecil. “After all there is nothing equal to Balholm. I had forgotten how lovely it was.”

As they glided on they left the little place bathed in sunshine, and in silence they watched it, till at last a bend in the fjord hid it from view.

Frithiof fell into deep thought.

What part had that passionate first love of his played in his life-story? Well, it had been to him a curse; it had dragged him down into depths of despair and to the verge of vice; it had steeped him in bitterness and filled his heart with anguish. Yet a more perfect love had awaited him—a passion less fierce but more tender, less vehement but more lasting; and all those years Cecil’s heart had really been his, though he had so little dreamed of it.

As if in a picture, he saw the stages through which he had passed—the rapture of mere physical existence; the intolerable pain and humiliation of Blanche’s betrayal; the anguish of bereavement; the shame of bankruptcy; the long effort to pay the debts; the slow return to belief in human beings; the toilsome steps that had each brought him a clearer knowledge of the Unseen, for which he had once felt no need; and, finally, this wonderful love springing up like a fountain in his life, ready to gladden his somewhat prosaic round of daily work.

It was evening when they left the steamer at Sogndal, but they were none of them in a mood for settling down, and indeed the weather was so hot that they often preferred traveling after supper. So it was arranged that they should go on to a very primitive little place called Hillestad, sleep there for a few hours, and then proceed to the Lyster fjord. Cecil, who was a much better walker than either Sigrid or Swanhild, was to go on foot with Frithiof; the others secured a stolkjaerre and a carriole, and went on in advance with the luggage.

The two lovers walked briskly along the side of the fjord, but slackened their pace when they reached the long, sandy hill, with its sharp zigzags; the evening was still and cloudless; above them towered huge, rocky cliffs, partly veiled by undergrowth, and all the air was sweet with the scent of the pine trees. They were close to St. Olaf’s well, where, from time immemorial, the country people have come to drink and pray for recovery from illness.

“Don’t you think we ought to drink to my future health,” said Frithiof.

He smiled, yet in his eyes she saw all the time the look of sadness that had come to him as they approached Balholm.

The one sting in his perfect happiness was the thought that he could not bring to Cecil the unbroken health that had once been his. He knew that the strain of his passed trouble had left upon him marks which he must carry to his grave, and that the consequences of Blanche’s faithlessness had brought with them a secret anxiety which must to some extent shadow Cecil’s life. The knowledge was hard: it humiliated him.

Cecil knew him so well that she read his thoughts in an instant.

“Look at all these little crosses set up in the moss on this rock!” she exclaimed when they had scrambled up the steep ascent. “I wonder how many hundreds of years this has been the custom? I wonder how many troubled people have come here to drink?”

“And have gained nothing by their superstition?” said Frithiof.

“It was superstition,” she said thoughtfully. “And yet, perhaps, the sight of the cross and the drinking of the water at least helped them to new thoughts of suffering and of life. Who knows, perhaps some of them went away able to glory in their infirmities?”

He did not speak for some minutes, but stood lost in the train of thought suggested to him by her words. The sadness gradually died out of his face, and she quite understood that it was with no trace of superstition, but merely as a sign of gratitude for a thought which had helped him, that he took two little straight twigs, stooped to drink from St. Olafskilde, and then set up his cross among the others in the mossy wall. After that they clambered down over the bowlders into the sandy road once more, and climbed the steep hill leisurely, planning many things for the future—the rooms in Rowan Tree House, the little wooden cottage that they meant to build at GÖdesund, three hours by water from Bergen, on a tiny island, which might be bought at a trifling cost; the bright holiday weeks that they would spend there; the work they might share; the efforts they might make together in their London life.

But the sharp contrast between this pictured future and the actual past could hardly fail to strike one of Frithiof’s temperament; it was the thought of this which prompted him to speak as they paused to rest on the wooded heights above Hillestad.

“I almost wonder,” he said, “that you have courage to marry such an ill-starred fellow as I have always proved to be. You are very brave to take the risk.”

She answered him only with her eyes.

“So,” he said with a smile, “you think, perhaps, after all the troubles there must be a good time coming?”

“That may very well be,” she replied, “but now that we belong to each other outer things matter little.”

“Do you remember the lines about Norway in the Princess?” he said. “Your love has made them true for me.”

“Say them now,” she said; “I have forgotten,”

And, looking out over the ruddy sky where, in this night hour, the glow of sunset mingled with the glow of dawn, he quoted the words:

She followed the direction of his gaze and looked, through the fir-trees on the hill upon which they were resting, down to the lovely lake which lay below them like a sheet of mother-of-pearl in the tranquil light. She looked beyond to the grand cliff-like mountains with their snowy tops touched here and there into the most exquisite rose-color by the rising sun; and then she turned back to the strong Norse face with its clearly cut features, its look of strength, and independence, and noble courage, and her heart throbbed with joy as she thought how foreign to it was that hard, bitter expression of the past. As he repeated the words “Set into sunrise” his eyes met hers fully; all the tenderness and strength of his nature and an infinite promise of future possibilities seemed to strike down into her very soul in that glance. He drew her toward him, and over both of them there stole the strange calm which is sometimes the outcome of strong feeling.

All nature seemed full of perfect peace; and with the sight of those snowy mountains and the familiar scent of the pines to tell him that he was indeed in his own country, with Cecil’s loving presence to assure him of his new possession, and with a peace in his heart which had first come to him in bitter humiliation and trouble, Frithiof, too, was at rest.

After all, what were the possible trials that lay before them? What was all earthly pain? Looked at in a true light, suffering seemed, indeed, but as this brief northern night, and death but as the herald of eternal day.

“Cecil,” said Frithiof, looking again into her sweet, grave eyes, “who would have thought that the LinnÆa gathered all those years ago should prove the first link in the chain that was to bind us together forever?”

“It was strange,” she replied, with a smile, as she gathered one of the long trails growing close by and looked at the lovely little white bells with their pink veins.

He took it from her, and began to twine it in her hair.

“I didn’t expect to find it here,” he said, “and brought a fine plant of it from Nord fjord. We must take it home with us that you may have some for your bridal wreath.”

She made a little exclamation of doubt.

“Why, Frithiof? How long do you think it will go on flowering?”

“For another month,” he said, taking her glowing face between his hands and stooping to kiss her.

“Only a month!” she faltered.

“Surely that will be long enough to read the banns?” he said, with a smile. “And you really ought not to keep the LinnÆa waiting a day longer.”