"I believe I did; but in looking back upon such moments as those one does not know whether one was feeling or speaking." She looked out into the long valley. She stood like one who is about to sing, with lifted head and open mouth, listening for the music before it sounds. But it was not so: it was the sound of bygone music that she heard.
A little while afterwards she said quite softly--the daughter was obliged to draw nearer to her, for the sound of the river swallowed up some of the words:
"Now you shall hear something, Magne; you have never heard it from me, and others are not likely to have told you."
"What is it, mother? You almost frighten me."
"At the time I met your father I was already engaged."
"Yes, I was engaged, and was to be married; and it was my last month with the Queen. The engagement had taken place, and was to be carried out with the highest sanction."
"Ah, that is it! Didn't I tell you before, that at the time I met your father I was in absolute despair?"
"I did not believe that life had anything to offer, or that I had anything to wait for. Most girls who arrive at the age of twenty-eight without anything having happened to them, anything that is worth rousing themselves for, believe that nothing is worth caring about. The age, or about that age, is the most perilous."
"That is when most girls come to despair."
She took her daughter's arm, which she pressed, and so they walked on together.
"I must confess it all to you"--but there she stopped.
"Who was it, mother?" She said it so softly that her mother didn't hear, but she knew what it was.
"It was some one for whom you have but small respect, my child. And you are right."
"Yes, it was. Yes, I see you don't understand it. I never understood it myself, either. Think of your father, and of him! And just about the same time, too. What do you think of me? But, oh! take care of yourself, my child."
"Well, well--_you_ have a mother, and I had none. And I was at Court, and, as I told you, at the perilous age when nothing seems worth caring about any longer. Of course I, too, had been playing the same game that I have been looking on at to-day, but not with your aptitude. Yes, you may turn away your face. I had come to feel a certain disgust with life--for myself among the rest--and so I went on refusing people till it was too late in the day."