What! All these years had passed, and he, the descendant
of a hundred Vikings, had been cheated of justice! He had seen his
wife,--the treasured darling of his days, suffering,--dying, inch by
inch, year by year, with all her radiant beauty withered,--and he had
never known her destroyer! Her fall from the edge of the chasm had been
deemed by them both an accident, and yet--this wretched Lovisa
Elsland--mad with misplaced, disappointed passion, jealousy, and
revenge,--had lived on to the extreme of life, triumphant and
unsuspected.
"I swear the gods have played me false in this!" he muttered, lifting
his eyes in a sort of fierce appeal to the motionless pinetops stiff
with frost. The mystery of the old hag's hatred of his daughter was now
made clear--she resembled her mother too closely to escape Lovisa's
malice. He remembered the curse she had called down upon the innocent
girl,--how it was she who had untiringly spread abroad the report among
the superstitious people of the place, that Thelma was a witch whose
presence was a blight upon the land,--how she had decoyed her into the
power of Mr.
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