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here, as a poor farm-servant, that I should hide myself. It seemed to me the last thing in the world—your world—that a woman who had lived my life would be expected to do.”
    “There was no certainty about it,” he answered. “It was a strong possibility, that’s all. Your problem, you see, was just what you say—to hide yourself. And you had another, I think. You had to get your living somehow. Everything you possessed—except some small sum in cash, I suppose—you left behind you when you disappeared. Now, a woman cannot very well go on acting and disguising herself for ever. A man can grow hair on his face or shave it off; for a woman, disguise must be a perpetual anxiety. If she has to get employment, and especially if she has no references, it’s an impossibility.”
    She nodded gravely. “That was how I saw it.”
    “So,” he pursued, “it came to this: that Lillemor Wergeland had to come to the surface again somewhere, and in no long time; Lillemor Wergeland, whose type of beauty and general appearance were so marked and unmistakable, and whose photograph had gone all over the world. The fact is that for some time I didn’t see how it could possibly have been done. There were only a few countries, I supposed, of which you knew enough of the language to make any attempt to live and work in them. In those countries you would always attract attention by your physical type and your accent; and if you attracted attention, discovery might follow at any moment. The more I thought of it the more difficult it seemed.
    “And then the idea came. There was one country in which your looks and speech would not betray you as a foreigner—your own country. And among those corners of the world where Lillemor Wergeland could go with a fair certainty of being unrecognised, the remoter villages of Norway would be. And at Myklebostad, on the Langfjord, which the map told me was thirty miles from the nearest town and sixty from the nearest railway, Lillemor Wergeland had a brother, who was also the richer by two thousand pounds for her supposed death.
    “You see, then, how I formed the theory which brought me to this place on a sketching holiday,” Trent stood up and gazed across the valley to the sunlit white peaks beyond. “I have visited Norway before, but I have never had such an interesting time. And now, before I return to the haunts of men, let me say again that I shall forget at once all that has happened to-day. Don’t think it was a vulgar curiosity that brought me here. There was once a supreme artiste called Lillemore Wergeland, whose gifts made me her debtor and servant. Anything that happened to her touched me; I had a sort of right to go seeking what it really was that had happened.”
    She stood before him in her coarse and stained clothes, her hands clasped behind her, with a face and attitude of perfect dignity.
    “Very well. You stand on your right, and I on mine—to arrange my own life, since I am alone in it. And I will spend it here, where it began. My soul was born here, before it went out to have adventures, and it has crept home again for comfort. Believe me, it is not only as you say, that I am safe from discovery here. That counts very much; but it is the truth that I felt I must go out of the world, and live out my life where it began, in this far-away, lonely place, where everything is humble, and there is no wealth or luxury at all, and the hills and the fjords are severe and grand, just as God made them before there were any men. Some people used to have that impulse, you know, long ago, when something had happened to make them tired of the world, or to stain their souls so that they must go apart and wash their wickedness away. And this, all this is my own, own land! And now,” she ended, suddenly, “we understand one another.”
    She extended her hand, saying, “I do not know your name.”
    “Why should you?” he asked, bending over it; then went quickly from her. At the