Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/24

 on his door-step, in the struggling moonbeams, peering out over the desolate white waste of snow to which earth and fiord were changed, wondered "what it all meant," that is to say was it a warning, a heavenly proclamation of some great event which might be expected to befal the village, the district, or possibly the whole land in the immediate future?

the same evening a young stranger was sitting in the study with the Provst, he had arrived the day before, when the snowstorm was at its height.

He was a tall slightly built man in a long black coat and white tie. His light blue eyes looked out with an open glance, from a pale childlike face. Over his forehead, which was high and arched, waved a quantity of slightly curling hair, and a fine growth of pale down was visible on his chin and down the sides of his cheeks.

Provst Tönnesen sat opposite to him in a large old fashioned porter's chair with earpieces and a neck cushion. He was a handsome man of giant build, with the bearing of a church dignitary; his head was massive, and, covered with short bristling white hair. Behind long,