"Suppose this should be the last party we give, Merle."
"Peer, what makes you say that?"
"Oh, nothing--only I have a sort of feeling, as if something had just
ended and something new was to begin. I feel like it, somehow. But I
wanted to thank you, too, for all the happy times we've had."
"But Peer--what--" She got no farther, for Peer had already left her and
joined a group of guests, where he was soon as gay as the rest.
Then came the day when the two visitors were to leave. Their birthday
gift to the young gentleman so lately christened Lorentz Uthoug stood in
the drawing-room; it was a bust in red granite, the height of a man,
of the Sun-god Re Hormachis, brought with them by the godfathers from
Alexandria. And now it sat in the drawing-room between palms in pots,
pressing its elbows against its sides and gazing with great dead eyes
out into endless space.
Peer stood on the quay waving farewell to his old comrades as the
steamer ploughed through the water, drawing after it a fan-shaped trail
of little waves.
And when he came home, he walked about the place, looking at farms and
woods, at Merle and the children, with eyes that seemed to her strange
and new.
Next night he stayed up once more alone, pacing to and fro in the great
hall, and looking out of the windows into the dark.
Was he ravelling out his life into golden threads that vanished and were
forgotten?
Was he content to be fuel instead of light?
What was he seeking? Happiness? And beyond it? As a boy he had called
it the anthem, the universal hymn.
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