"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