Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/313

cunning to parry—an easy prey to the foil of cruel circumstance. Therefore she met Ole Ormond, aware that he was the husband intended for her, and terrified because Fate had gone against her and was so powerful. It was Fate now, not God, that held her life.

She tightened her lips therefore, and hardened her heart in presence of the inevitable.

As for Johanna's uncle, when he of set purpose invited Ole Ormond to sup with him at the farm and spend the night, he acted, as he would have declared, entirely for his niece's benefit. Ormond was a thriving man. He had been the only child of his parents, and they, too, were without relations. The farm he had inherited had become his, then, without encumbrances. To Johanna's uncle—who had charged upon his estate the keeping of two aged aunts, three sisters, and a mother, all of whom participated according to Norwegian law, in its profits—this was a circumstance much in Ole's favour and to his personal advantage.

But Berg must have hesitated, for he was a humane and kindly creature, in bringing so inflammatory a nature, so yearning a nature, as Ormond's, in contact with that of a girl so sweetly fascinating as Johanna, had he guessed what Ormond was and known Johanna's feelings. A glance at the man would have told a thinker of such things that Ormond was no ordinary person. Johanna, to whom the aspect of anything was always arrestive, looked at him again and again, with the furtive, watching gaze of a perplexed but interested spectator, at supper upon the first night of their meeting. Ormond's hair was absolutely white—thick, healthy, in generous waves, but white. His face, too, was white, his features clearly cut and strong, his eyes dark and flashing. The pathetic droop of his mouth betrayed him. He was a man of intense feeling. Even while he laughed and made merry with the house mistress, upon whom the fascination of his picturesquepresence