Chapter 19 - Page 2

which she treated the young clerk. Elizabeth would answer that he
bored her; and Madame Garvloit would insist that a young girl ought to
have tact enough not to make this evident. Elizabeth, however, was not
deficient in tact, but disliked putting a restraint upon her feelings;
and it seemed to her on the whole unreasonable that a person should
pretend that a thing was pleasant when in reality it was wearisome.

During the second autumn of her service with the Garvloits, the skipper,
on his return from a trip to Norway, brought the intelligence that
Lieutenant Beck was engaged to Postmaster Forstberg's daughter in
Arendal, and he had many messages for Elizabeth from the latter. They
were to be married in the spring.

Elizabeth was overjoyed to hear it, for the thought had often weighed
heavily on her mind that Carl Beck might be making himself miserable on
her account. She judged so from her own feeling for Salvé: and as she
sat alone by her window at bedtime that night, gazing out over the canal
and the shipping in the calm moonlight, the quiet afterglow of a holiday
evening seemed to have shed itself over her thoughts. She knew from her
friend's message that she was ignorant of what had passed between
herself and Carl Beck; and although it was a relief to think that he had
not taken his disappointment more to heart, the smile that played about
her lips for a moment showed at the same time that his love had been
duly appraised. As the shadow, then, of the window-frame in the
moonlight, crept slowly over the wall above her bed, her thoughts glided
off in the direction they loved best to take--over the world and far
away to Salvé.

She sat with her heavy hair falling loose over her well-shaped
shoulders, and her face grew more and more sorrowful in its absent
expression, and would twitch occasionally with pain. The bitter thought
would recur that it was she who was the cause of Salvé's going out into
the world and becoming a desperate man. The thought haunted her; and
yet, much as she wished to free herself from it, she found a pleasure in
dwelling on it. She saw him, in fancy, miserable and proud, with his
pale face and keen, clever eyes fixed upon her in hatred, as the cause
of his unhappiness, and then the idea occurred to her to put on sailor's
clothes and go and seek him out in the world. But if she were to find
him, she knew, on the other hand, that for very shame she dared not show
herself before him, having as good as belonged to another; and she would
not for all the world read her hard dismissal in his eye. She laid her
head upon her arms on the window-sill and sobbed convulsively, until at
length she dropped off to sleep where she sat.

She had been three years in