Ib and Little Christine

All the money her husband had inherited from his parents had made him proud and arrogant. He had given up his good position, had traveled for half a year in foreign lands, and on his return had gone heavily into debt and still lived in an expensive manner. The coach had leaned over had leaned over more and more, so to speak, until at last it turned over completely. The many merry companions he had entertained declared it served him right, for he had kept his house like a madman. And so one morning his corpse was found in a canal.

The icy hand of death was already on Christine. Her youngest child, expected in prosperity but born in misery only a few weeks ago, was already in its grave, and Christine was close to it herself. She lay forsaken, sick unto death, in a miserable room, amid poverty which she might have endured in her younger days at Seishede, but which now, accustomed as she had been to better things, she felt most painfully. It was her eldest child, also a little Christine, and sharing her hunger and poverty, whom Ib had now brought home.?

"I am tormented at the thought of dying and leaving the poor child alone!" she sighed. "Ah, what is to become of the poor little thing!" And not a word more could she speak.

Ib took another match and lit a piece of candle he found in the room, and the flame illuminated the pitiful dwelling. Then he looked at the little girl and remembered how Christine had looked when she was that age, and he felt that for her sake he would love this child, which was still a stranger to him. The dying woman gazed at him, and her eyes opened wider and wider; did she recognize him? He was never to know, for no further word passed her lips.

In the forest by the Gudenaa, near Seishede, the air was thick and dark, and there were no blossoms on the heath plant. The autumn winds whirled the yellow leaves from the wood into the stream or out over the heath toward the boatman's hut, where strangers lived now. But beneath the ridge, safe beneath the protection of the large trees, stood the little farmhouse, neatly painted and whitewashed, and within it the turf blazed up cheerfully in the chimney.