wasted time and wasted strength.
"And as the days go by," Knutty continued boldly, "you will feel differently about everything, dear one. And then you must find some one whose aura will be entirely sympathetic with your aura. Ah, you shake your head, Clifford."
"Hush, hush, you must not say that," he said, turning away from her.
"Well, well," she said, half to herself, "perhaps I press on too quickly. But you will go away – promise me that? And shut up 'Falun' with all its sad memories?"
"In my secret heart," she thought, "I should like to blow up 'Falun' and have done with the wretched place!"
"If we go away, will you come too, Knutty?" he said eagerly. "We would take such care of you."
"Seventy years of age, and seventeen stone in weight!" she replied gaily. "No, no, kjaere, I should be too heavy a responsibility. No, I will wait for you in my own little Danish home, made so wickedly comfortable by your kindness; and every day I shall say, 'My Clifford is finding his way into the sunlight again.'"
He stooped down and kissed her kind old hand.
"If I could only tell you my inmost thoughts; but I cannot," he said sadly.
"You never could unfold yourself, dear one," she answered. "You know I always had to guess at what was going on within your mind, and always guessed wrong, of course, and therefore could not help you. I am sure there can be no mental or physical suffering so great as reluctant repression of the thoughts within us."
"Knutty," he said, after a pause, "do you believe that minds can reach each other in dreams?"
"I don't know, kjaere," she said. "I have never reached any one's mind, either in a dream or out of one. In the years gone by, I prided myself on doing so, and then found out that I was mistaken. My present belief is that no one mind can ever reach another in reality, and that each human being speaks and understands only one language – his own language – and every one else's language is what you English people call a 'damned foreign tongue.' Excuse me, dear one, my words may not be academic, but they are supposed to be philosophic. And that reminds me that, in my opinion, you have been a true philosopher, Clifford."
"How so, Knutty?" he said.
"You have asked very little of any one," she answered, "and you have made a successful fight with bitterness. That is what I call true philosophy."
He shook his head in deprecation of her praise, and after another pause he said:
"Do you think, Knutty, that one might be able to injure another person in and through a dream?"
"How should I know?" she said, looking troubled. "I am not given to reflecting on such matters, thank Heaven."
"If one could injure, one could also benefit," he said, without heeding her answer. "There would at least be that comfort – for others."
"And why not for you?" she asked.
"Alas!" he answered, "my dreams were always the other way."
But after he had said that, he returned hastily to his usual reserve, and Fröken Knudsgaard understood him too well to press him for a confidence.
"Besides, it would be waste of tissue," she said to herself. "One would have more success in pressing an alabaster effigy."
But in this way she had had one or two glimpses into his mind, and she was really anxious about his mental state, and not happy about Alan either. She kept her shrewd old eyes open, and she began to see that Alan sometimes avoided being alone with his father. He seemed a little awkward with him, as though some shadow had risen up between them. He too was reserved, and Knutty could not get him to speak of his mother's death.
"I am living with a pair of icebergs," she wrote to her botanist nephew and niece in Copenhagen, Ejnar and Gerda. "Darling icebergs both of them, but icebergs all the same. I find this Arctic expedition of mine, like all Arctic expeditions, fraught with grave difficulties. Write and encourage me, dear ones; and in case I should become a frozen plant, keep an extra warm place for me in the herbarium of your hearts."
But Alan was not reserved about other matters, and he and the old Danish lady became excellent friends together. He said repeatedly to her:
"Knutty, why haven't you been to see us more often?"
And Knutty, stroking her chin, would reply:
"The climate, dear one, the climate; either too hot or too cold; too dry or too wet – generally too wet! Anyway, the atmosphere didn't suit me; too trying."
And of course she was speaking of the mental atmosphere of "Falun."
She transformed "Falun" into an abode of comparative cheerfulness, and brightened up the house in a most astonishing manner. The boy hastened home from his riding or cycling. There was something to go back for now; and Knutty was always in a good temper, always ready to be photographed at the exact moment when she was wanted, and always ready to sympathise with electric batteries, books on architecture, square towers, round towers, telephones, and of course chemical experiments.
"Make any experiments you like," she said. "Don't be afraid of blowing me up. I have been accustomed to it for years. In fact, I prefer it. Anything is better than monotony. The unexpected is always delightful, and it is quite refreshing to have a few fingers blown off in a thrilling fashion, or even a head! Most people lose their heads in a much less interesting way, and under much less provocation. And as for smells, Alan, I worship them. In fact, I feel quite exhilarated when I have the smell of that adorable sulphuretted-hydrogen under my Danish nose. As for architecture, I could listen all the day long to anything you have to say on that subject. I am glad you are going to be an architect; indeed you cannot with any self-respect be anything else, since you were christened after your father's hero, Alan de Walsingham. Only listen: if you don't succeed in building a cathedral every bit as fine as Ely, I shall cut you off from my visiting-list. So there. Now you know what you have to expect from old Knutty."
She disliked the dismal drawing-room. She was much happier sitting in the laboratory, and even happier in the dark room, where Alan sometimes enticed her. And occasionally he got her out for a walk, which was a great concession; for Knutty hated walking. She always declared it was the invention of the devil.
In fact she won him entirely, and then by many subtle processes, she tried to find out what his real feelings were towards his father. He undoubtedly loved his father, but there was something troubling his mind: something which had to be cleared up; and from Clifford's allusion to his own fears of the boy turning against him, Knutty guessed that the father too was conscious of a change in his son's attitude towards him. Whatever it was, it must not be allowed to grow. She was nearly distracted between the two of them. Sometimes she thought it would be better for them to be separated for a little while, and at other times she believed it would be safer for them to have a complete understanding at once. One morning Alan's strained manner to his father strengthened her in the belief that her two icebergs must be brought into closer contact again before they drifted away into different parts of the Arctic regions, where they might never rejoin. By means of great craft, she at last managed to make Alan speak of his mother, and then some of the trouble came tumbling out. He regretted so bitterly that he had told his mother that he knew his father and she were unhappy together; he regretted so bitterly that he had said it was all her fault.
"And to think that those were the last words I ever said to her," he said with almost a sob.
He did not say that he blamed his father for telling him about the proposed separation,
