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Karen stopped when they had gone a little way and leaned her elbows on the stone wall looking out at the sea. "She has been everything to me," she said. "Everything." He was aware, as he leaned beside her in the mellow evening light, of a great uneasiness mingling with the beautiful gravity of the moment. She was near him as she had never yet been near. She had almost recognized his love.
"He looked indeed, a stockish, chill young man, of the cold-nosed type ah, que je n'aime pas ça! but he is a good young man; a most unimpeachable young man; and our little Karen has melted him; how much his letter shows." "Gregory Jardine is a very able and a very distinguished person," said Miss Scrotton, "and of an excellent county family.
He is really very fond of Mrs. Talcott, Tante, and she of him, I think. It would please you to see them together." Karen spoke on innocently; but, as she spoke, she became aware from a new steadiness in her guardian's look, that her words had conveyed some significance of which she was herself unconscious. Madame von Marwitz's hand had tightened on hers. "Ah," she said after a moment.
Her eyes stood rigid in the darkness; she pressed her hands to her head, to her breast; she moaned; she did not understand she did not understand But when she heard Madame calling so piteously, 'Karen, Karen! she sprang up, rushed out of the yard, round the back of the house, out out upon the heath.
Karen makes a marriage that is unhappy; it is known that she is not happy with her husband. Did you not yourself see that all was not well with them? It has been known for long. You arrive in London; Karen sees you again; next day she flies from Mr. Jardine and takes refuge with you at your lodgings. Yes, you will say, but your mother, your sisters, too, were there.
After three months of intimacy, Karen still constantly arrested him with a sense of the undiscovered, the unforeseen. What it consisted in he could not have defined; she was simple, even guileless, still; she had no reticences; yet she seemed to express so much of which she was unaware that he felt himself to be continually making her acquaintance.
I don't know," Karen reflected, genially. "I often feel, oh far older than the people I talk with." "Do you, mon enfant. Some children, it is true, are far wiser than their elders. You are a wise child; but you are young, Karen, very young for your years, in appearance, in demeanour, in candour of outlook. Tell me; have you ever contemplated your future? asked yourself about it?"
She said no word, nor did Karen, and in the long stillness delirium again flickered through Karen's brain, and Tante, standing there, became a nightmare presence, dead, gazing, immutable. Then she moved again, and the slow, soft moving was more dreadful than the stillness, and coming forward Tante fell on her knees beside the bed and hid her face in the bed-clothes.
"What do you suppose Karen will say, when she sees us bringing her brother over the rocks?" she ran to ask Birger in one room, and then ran to ask her father in another.
Her husband, delicate from the first, never entirely recovered the sufferings at the wharf; yet in spite of an affection of the lungs, he would often walk twenty miles a day through the Karen villages, teaching and preaching, and at night have no food but rice, and sleep on a mat on the floor of an open zayat.
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