gentle ministry, that it required a great effort, an effort of conscience, to rouse him once more, as his strength returned.     

       “Had you not better stay?” she asked, as he rose to put on his overcoat.       “I will call one of the servants and have him show you a room. We will say to-morrow morning that you were taken ill, and nobody will wonder.”      

       “No, no,” he responded, energetically. “I am perfectly strong now.” But he still had to lean on a chair, and his face was deathly pale.     

       “Farewell, Miss Edith,” he said; and a tender sadness trembled in his voice. “Farewell. We shall—probably—never meet again.”      

       “Do not speak so,” she answered, seizing his hand. “You will try to forget this, and you will still be great and happy. And when fortune shall again smile upon you, and—and—you will be content to be my friend, then we shall see each other as before.”      

       “No, no,” he broke forth, with a sudden hoarseness. “It will never be.”      

       He walked toward the door with the motions of one who feels death in his limbs; then stopped once more and his eyes lingered with inexpressible sadness on the wonderful, beloved form which stood dimly outlined before him in the twilight. Then Edith’s measure of misery, too, seemed full. With the divine heedlessness which belongs to her sex, she rushed up toward him, and remembering only that he was weak and unhappy, and that he suffered for her sake, she took his face between her hands and kissed him. He was too generous a man to misinterpret the act; so he whispered but once more: “Farewell,” and hastened away.     

  

       VII.     

       After that eventful December night, America was no more what it had been to Halfdan Bjerk. A strange torpidity had come over him; every rising day gazed into his eyes with a fierce unmeaning glare. The noise of the street annoyed him and made him childishly fretful, and the solitude of his own room seemed still more dreary and depressing. He went mechanically through the daily routine of his duties as if the soul had been taken out of his work, and left his life all barrenness and desolation. He moved restlessly from place to place, roamed at all times of the day and night 

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