She wrote: "Dear Miss Brandt, I, too, ask you to send the
Counsellor his billet, and I pray you to write upon it: 'Given me
by Miss Hjelm.' It is best for all parties that the fun does not
come out in gossip. You shall, by return of mail, receive back
your letters."

VI.

It is allowed to charitable minds to remain in doubt about what
had really been Miss Brandt's design. Perhaps she only wished to
make roguish psychological experiments, to convince herself to how
many forenoon congratulatory visits a Counsellor of Justice of the
Superior Court could be brought to appear. The emotion she almost
exposed, when at Mrs. Canuteson's she saw Bagger by Miss Hjelm's
side, may have been pure surprise at the working of the affair.
Every one of the rest of us who have been conversant with the
whirlwind, the letter, and Ingeborg's relinquishment of the same,
would also have been surprised at seeing her and the letter-writer
brought together notwithstanding, and would not, perhaps, have
been able with as much ease and success to hide our surprise. The
letter to Bagger, in which Miss Brandt, contrary to her better
knowledge, spoke of him as married, may have been a sincere
attempt to end the whole in a way which repentance and anxiety
quickly seized upon to put an insurmountable hindrance before
herself; but it may surely enough have had also the aim to see how
far Bagger had gone and how much spirit and fancy he had to carry
the intrigue out. The more one thinks upon it, the less one feels
able to give either of the two interpretations absolute
preference. Yet one will have remarked, that Ingeborg herself in
her little note mentioned the matter as "fun." On the other side,