“Hatred is an ugly thing; it makes everything ugly that comes in contact with it. I went to see my sister last summer. We have never been sympathetic, but I thought it disgusting to see her with that husband of hers. Sometimes I saw him kiss her—taking his pipe out of his thick wet mouth, he kissed his wife. I saw Sophy get quite white when he touched her. He is a pope in his pulpit and a libertine at home.
“As to you and me—it was quite natural. I understood it afterwards—that the fine, delicate threads between us should break, that they could not stand the atmosphere at home. When I had gone from you that time I regretted it, and meant to write to you, but do you know why I did not? I had a letter from my father, telling me he had been to see you and that he thought I ought to resume my relations with you. I have a superstitious objection to any advice from that quarter, so I did not write.
“All the time since we parted I have been longing for you, Jenny, dreaming of you, and recalling again and again to my memory the time I spent here with you. Do you know which place in Rome I revisited first of all—yesterday? I went to Montagnola and I found our names on the cactus leaf.”
Jenny was sitting with clenched hands, very pale.
“You look exactly the same as then, and you have lived three years about which I don’t know anything,” said Helge gently. “I can scarcely realize that I am here with you again—it seems as if all that has happened since we parted here in Rome were not true. Yet you belong perhaps to somebody else now?”
Jenny did not answer.
“Are you engaged?” he asked quietly.
“No.”
“Jenny”—Helge bent his head so that she could not see his face—“all these years I have been hoping—dreaming of winning you back. I have imagined that we should meet again some day and come to an understanding. You said I was the first man you had been fond of. Is my dream impossible?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Heggen?”
She did not answer at once.
“I have always been jealous of Heggen,” said Helge gently. “I thought he was the one, especially when I saw that you both lived here. So you are in love with each other?”
Jenny still did not answer.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes, but I will not marry him.”
“Oh, I see,” said Helge, in a hard voice.
“No.” She bent her head, tired, smiling sadly: “I have done with love; I don’t want to have anything more to do with it. I am tired, and I wish you would go, Helge.”
But he did not move.
“I cannot realize now when I see you again that it is all over. I never would believe it. I have been thinking so much of it, I suppose it was my own fault. I was so timid, I never knew what was the right thing to do. Everything might have been quite different. I have often remembered the last evening I was with you in Rome, and it seemed always that such an occasion would present itself again, for I left you then because I thought it was right. Surely, that could not have been the cause of my losing you? I had never been near a woman then,” he said, looking down. “I was warned by what I had seen at home. Dreams and fancies became a hell at times, but that fear was always paramount.
“I am twenty-nine and there has been no beautiful or happy experience in my life but that short spring spent with you. Can you not understand that I have never been able to separate you from my thoughts, that I love you as before? The only happiness I have known is that you gave me. I cannot let you go out of my life—not now.”
She got up, trembling, and he rose too. Instinctively she drew back a few steps from him:
“Helge, there has been another.”
He stood still, looking at her.
“You say there has been another—and it could have been I. I don’t care; I want you all the same. I want you now because you promised me once to be mine.”
Terrified, she tried to go past him, but he seized her violently in his arms. It took a few seconds for her brain to realize that he was kissing her mouth. She thought she made a resistance, but was in fact almost passive in his arms. She wanted to tell him not to, and she wanted to say who the other had been, but she could not. She would have told him about the child, but when she remembered the boy she shrank from mentioning him; she felt she must not drag her child into the disaster she knew was coming. As this thought crossed her mind she imagined she felt the dead little one caressing her, and it gave her a sensation of joy, so that her body relaxed for a second in his arms.
“You are mine—mine only—yes, yes, Jenny!”
She tore herself away from him and, running to the door, she called aloud for Gunnar. Helge was at her side again in an instant, taking her back in his arms.
They wrestled with each other by the door without a word. It seemed to Jenny that her life depended on her opening it and escaping into
