Ingmar now looked at her with a newborn hope in his gaze.
"I was so frightened when you came this morning," she confessed, "I felt that I couldn't resist you, and that the old struggle would begin anew."
Ingmar's face was beaming.
"But this evening, when I heard about your having helped the one man whom you hated, I couldn't hold out any longer." Gertrude grew scarlet. "I felt somehow that I had not the strength to do a thing that would part me from you." Then she bowed her head over Ingmar's hand, and kissed it.
And it seemed to Ingmar as if great bells were ringing in a holy day. Within reigned Sabbath peace and stillness, while love, honey sweet, rested upon his lips, filling his whole being with a blissful solace.
BOOK THREE
LOSS OF "L'UNIVERS"
One misty night in the summer of 1880—about two years before the
schoolmaster's mission house was built and Hellgum's return from
America—the great French liner L'Univers was steaming across the
Atlantic, from New York and bound for Havre.
It was about four o'clock in the morning and all the passengers, as well as most of the crew, were asleep in their berths. The big decks were entirely empty of people.
Just then, at the break of day, an old French sailor lay twisting and turning in his hammock, unable to rest. There was quite a sea on, and the ship's timbers creaked incessantly; but it was certainly not this that kept him from falling asleep. He and his mates occupied a large but exceedingly low compartment between decks. It was lighted by a couple of lanterns, so that he could see the gray hammocks, which hung in close rows, slowly swinging to and fro with their slumbering occupants. Now and again a strong gust of wind swept in through one of the hatches, which was so searchingly cold and damp that it brought to his mind's eye a vivid picture of the vast sea around him, rolling its grayish green waves beneath its veil of mists.