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

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EMANUEL; OR

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?

CHAPTER II

On 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,