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 The love that others found enough was not enough for her—it was better for her to dispense with it altogether than to be contented.

Yes, she would remember, but as years went by the memory of the short happiness mixed with so much pain and bitter repentance would perhaps be less poignant, and she would be able partly to wipe out the memory of the man to whom she had done a deadly wrong—and whose child perhaps she bore.

No; it was impossible. Why lie here brooding over it?

But if it were true.…

When Jenny at last sank into a heavy and dreamless sleep it was almost daylight, but when she awoke again with a shock, it was not much lighter. The sky was a little more yellow above the garden trees, and the birds were chirping sleepily. She was instantly wide awake, and the same thoughts returned; she would hardly get any more sleep that night, and she resigned herself to thinking them over and over again.

EGGEN had left; the Colonel and Borghild had returned and gone again to pay a visit to a married sister of Francesca's. Jenny and Cesca were alone, and they went about by themselves, deep in their own thoughts.

Jenny was convinced now of her condition, but she had not been able to realize what it all meant; if she tried to think of the future, her imagination stood still. She was, on the whole, in a better frame of mind now than in the first desperate weeks when she was waiting anxiously for her suspicions to be disproved.