Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/297

How anxious and inquisitive their expression was at first! But they smiled when their master smiled on them, and withdrew their heads rapidly after the smile.

When breakfast was over, and he had passed outside with Lauritz and Pauline to admire the mimic gardens the children had made for him in the sandy soil before the school, Hjorth dismissed them and bent his steps towards the sea-shore. He desired to be alone. He wanted to exult once more in the sensations of the occasion, and to picture again to himself the scene that was shortly to take place in the church, in which he would be the man of the hour. Accustomed as he was to live alone, this habit of introspective and anticipatory imagination had grown upon him. Whenever he was strongly moved he craved for solitude and an opportunity to think the whole situation through, just as urgently as other men crave for the companionship and sympathy of a dearly loved friend, into whose ears they can tell, perhaps in a fragmentary way, perhaps fully, as best suits their needs, all that is in their hearts.

The young deacon would not have felt himself so satisfying if he had not been true to himself. Mistaken and foolish he was, perhaps, but at least in his way he was honest.

He almost ran to the shore; he was so anxious to get to a certain place where he knew he should be absolutely alone. He found it. It was a high promontory jutting out into the open ocean, from which he could see, as he stood looking landwards upon his left, a wild shallow bay of sand, upon his right a jagged outline of sea-fringe, one mass of rocks, and then as far as the horizon pile after pile of strange boulder hills, like an exaggerated lava field, melting away above the sandy bay into a waving plain of wild moorland.

He was absolutely alone; the one human thing in a great in-animate