"Puh-h-h!" thought Bagger, seating himself with intense relief, "I
have come out of it somewhat decently after all. The deuce take me
before I again express a sentimentality."

How Counsellor Bagger that night could have fallen asleep, between
memory, or longing and discontent, is difficult to tell, had he
not on his arrival home found a package of papers, an interesting
theft case. He sat down instantly to read, and day dawned ere they
were finished. His last thought, before his eyelids closed, was,--
Two years in the House of Correction.

III.

A month later, toward the close of September, two ladies, twenty
or twenty-two years of age, were walking in a garden about ten
miles from Copenhagen. Although the walks were quite wide,
impediments in them made it difficult for the ladies to go side by
side. The autumn showed itself uneven and jagged. The currant and
gooseberry boughs, that earlier hung in soft arches, now projected
stiffly forth, catching in the ladies' dresses; branches from plum
and apple trees hung bare and broken, and required attention above
also. One of the ladies apparently was at home there: this was
evident partly from her dress, which, although elegant, was
domestic, and partly by her taking the lead and paying honor, by
drawing boughs and branches aside, holding them until the other
lady, who was more showily dressed, had slipped past. On account
of the hindrances of the walk there were none of those easy,
subdued, familiar conversations, which otherwise so naturally
arise when young ladies, acquaintances, or "friends," visit each
other, and from the house slip out alone into garden or wood. An