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“Naturally.”

“A year after a tourist wrote in a newspaper that he had seen the runaway maid of honour standing at the washing-tub. Ha, ha! It was true enough for that matter. You had come, then, and it was harvest-time, and I was obliged to lend a hand. We both did.”

“Mother, mother, what was he like at home? When you were together, I mean? Wasn’t it perfect? It must have been the greatest and best thing the world had to give? Mother, mother, all my life I must be grateful to you for having treasured this up for me till now, for before I should not have understood it.”

“Yes, isn’t it so? Such things cannot be told to a child, nor to a half-grown girl. But I am not telling you, now, only for the sake of telling you. You ask how things were when we were together. Picture him to yourself first. An unselfish, devoted nature that was very little understood, by some few perhaps, in a way, but even by them not adequately. The result was that when he believed he had found sympathy, he poured himself out so unrestrainedly that people laughed at him. If he were in company he drank, or rather was made to drink, until he was tipsy, and so let his untamable nature take the bit in its teeth. Do you know–yes, I must tell you this. At a party a lady (she is now married to the captain here) set to work to draw him out for the amusement of the others. She was very bright and witty; she appeared to be entirely carried away by him, so that she could not listen to him enough, could not question him enough, and all the while poured more and more wine into his glass. She drank with him; she made all the others drink with him.”

“Good heavens, mother!”

“Do you know where it all ended? In the cowhouse. They locked him into the cowhouse by himself. His frenzy of rage brought on a nervous attack. She it was whom he saw from the window as he stood on the platform that day. It was then he became sober.”

The mother and daughter walked on in silence.

“You knew nothing of all this at that time, did you, mother?–not until later?”

“No; if I had known it, I believe I should have gone straight up to him, taken him by the hand, and greeted him with all my heart.”

“I should too, mother!”

“Since my life with him I have thought a great deal. Do you know, I believe geniuses have this characteristic of confiding impulsiveness, and therefore the people and conditions that surround them are of all the greater importance. But most important of all is it that they should have a woman’s help. And, according to the nature of that help, so things go with them. Karl Mander had got into the habit of speaking in monologues. He got on best among peasants. They disturbed him least. Books, meditations, farming, bathing, and now and then an orgie, a speech, or, for preference, one on top of the other–that had been his life up to then.”

“But he didn’t drink, mother? There was no need for him to drink, was there?”

“No more need than for you or for me. It was simply an outburst of mere high spirits, or repressed longing for happiness. So the last time—-“

“Yes, that time! Oh, why were you not there?”

“You had come to us then, my child, and I could not; I was nursing you at my breast. The whole thing would have gone off happily, if some one at the banquet after the meeting had not been so imprudent as to propose my health! Then he let himself go! There was the theme of themes, and he had never unbosomed himself about it to any one! The toast applied the match to his inward fire; his exultant joy blazed up. He made a speech in praise of at least twenty of my characteristics, of marriage, of fatherhood. He—-“