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Then again he would talk of her own house. "My Grandpapa," he said, "has got corns, the worst corns in Copenhagen. When they
get very bad, he sighs and moans, he says: ‘There will be storms in the Chinese Sea, it is a damned business, my ships are going to the bottom.’ So, you know, I think that the seamen will be saying: ‘There is a storm in this sea, it is a damned business, our ship is going to the bottom. Now it is time that old Grandpapa, in Bredgade, goes and has his corns out.’"

Only within the last days of his life did he speak of Mamzell Ane. Shehad been, as it were, his Musa, the only person who had knowledge ofthe one and the other of his worlds. As he recalled her, his tone ofspeech changed, he held forth in a grand, solemn manner, as upon an elemental power, of necessity known to every one.

If Emilie had given his fantasies her attention, many things might have been made clear to her. But she said: "No, I do not know her, Jens. "

"Oh, Mamma, she knows you well!" he said, "she sewed you wedding gown,all of white satin. It was slow work—so many fittings! And my Papa,"the child went on and laughed, "he came in to you and do you know whathe said? He said: ‘My white rose.’"

He suddenly bethought himself of the scissors which Mamzell Ane had left him, and wanted them, and this was the only occasion upon which Emilie ever saw him impatient or fretful.

She left her house, for the first time within three weeks, and went herself to Madam Mahler’s house to inquire about the scissors. On the way, the powerful, enigmatical figure of Mamzell Ane took on for her the aspect of a Parca, of Atropos herself, scissors in hand, ready to cut off the thread of life. But Madam Mahler in the meantime had bartered away the scissors to a tailor of her acquaintance, and she flatly denied the existence both of them and of Mamzell Ane.

Upon the last morning of the boy’s life, Emilie lifted her small pug,that had been his faithful playmate, on to the bed. Then the littledark face and the crumpled body seemed to recall to him the countenance of his friend. "There she is!" he cried.

Emilie’s mother-in-law, and the old shipowner himself, had been dailyvisitors to the sick room. The whole Vandamm family stood weepinground the bed when, in the end, like a small brook which falls intothe ocean, Jens gave himself up to the boundless, final unity of dream, and was absorbed in it.

He died at the end of March, a few days before the date that Emilie had fixed to decide on his fitness for admission into the house of Vandamm. Her father suddenly determined that he must be interred in the family vault—irregularly, since he was never legally adopted into the family. So he was laid down behind a heavy wrought-iron fence, in the finest grave that any Plejelt had ever obtained.

In the following days the house in Bredgade, and its inhabitants withit, shrank and decreased. The people were a little confused, as aftera fall, and seized by a sad sense of diffidence. For the first weeksafter Jens’s burial, life looked to them strangely insipid, a sorryaffair, void of purport. The Vandamms were not used to being unhappy,and were not prepared for the sense of loss with which now the deathof the child left them. To Jakob, it seemed as if he had let down afriend, who had after all, laughingly trusted in his strength—nownobody had any use for it, and he saw himself as a freak, the stuffedpuppet of a colossus. But with all this, after a while there was alsoin the survivors, as ever at the passing away of an idealist, a vaguefeeling of relief.