“Oh yes, good soul; I am sure she is.” He smiled. “I think she suspects me of being the culprit.”
They walked on in silence. After a while Gunnar asked:
“How are you going to arrange matters? Have you made any plans as to the future?”
“I don’t know yet. I suppose you mean about the child? I may leave it with Mrs. Schlessinger for a time; she would look after it all right, I dare say. Or I may get some one to adopt it; you know, such children are adopted sometimes. I might call myself Mrs. Winge and never mind what people think.”
“You are quite decided, then, to break completely with—er—the man concerned? You wrote me to that effect.”
“I am,” she said firmly. “It is not the man I was engaged to,” she added, after a pause.
“Thank God!” he burst out, so relieved that Jenny could not help smiling a little.
“Well, you know, Jenny, he was not worth reproducing—not by you anyway. I saw in the papers recently that he has got his doctor’s degree. Well, it might have been worse—I was afraid....”
Heggen came to a dead stop. She fell to crying desperately, and he put his arm round her and laid his hand to her cheek while she went on sobbing with her head on his shoulder.
Standing so, she began to tell him all about it. Once she looked up at his face; it was pale and haggard; and she started crying again. When she stopped, he lifted her head, looking at her:
“My God, Jenny—what you must have suffered! I cannot realize it.”
They walked back to the village in silence.
“Come with me to Berlin,” he said suddenly. “I cannot bear to think of you here alone and brooding over this.”
“I have almost given up thinking,” she said, tired.
“Oh, it’s too awful!” he burst out, with such violence that she came to a sudden stop. “Always the best of you that get let in for this kind of thing, and we have no idea of what you have to go through. It is dreadful!”
Heggen stayed three days. Jenny could not explain why, but she felt much better after his visit. The unbearable feeling of humiliation was gone; she was able to face her confinement with more composure and confidence.
Mrs. Schlessinger went about smiling slyly in spite of Jenny’s declaration that the gentleman was her cousin.
He had offered to send her some of his books, and at Christmas a whole case arrived, besides flowers and chocolates. Every week he wrote her a long letter about all manner of trifles, enclosing cuttings from Norwegian papers. In January he came up for her birthday and stayed two days, leaving behind some of the latest Norwegian books. Shortly after his last visit she fell ill. She was poorly, worried, and sleepless during the remaining weeks. She had never busied her thoughts with the actual confinement or been anxious about it before, but, feeling always wretched now, she was seized by a sudden dread of what she had to go through, and when the time came she was quite worn out with insomnia and anxiety.