"Dick, Dick! are you asleep?"
"No, not quite," answered the other, sitting up in bed.
"Well, then, perhaps there was something in what you said just now. Good night."
"Good night," said the attaché, lying down with a smile on his face. A few minutes after the two old gentlemen were snoring peacefully in unison.
CHAPTER IX.
Gustaf Torpander was still consumed by his silent passion. Every penny he could save he devoted either to heightening his personal attractions or to treating Marianne's brother; for hitherto he had never had the courage to offer her any presents personally. The circuitous course he was thus driven to follow in his courtship, was not altogether agreeable to the Swede, and the drinking bouts at Begmand's cottage, in which he was obliged to take part in order to get a glimpse of his sweetheart, he found particularly distasteful.
At first Marianne was greatly annoyed by the attentions of the journeyman printer. From her earliest childhood, the knowledge of her exceptional beauty had made her careful to be on her guard against any advances from the other sex; but since her misfortune, she had come to regard every attention as a kind of persecution. But her shyness was generally received with an incredulous smile or a coarse joke. What shocked her most was, that men seemed no longer to believe that she really meant to shun them in earnest, and she was therefore quite nervous if any of them approached her. When, however, she saw that Torpander did not presume on his acquaintance, and preserved his polite and even respectful manner, she became at last used to his society, and had even a kind of sympathetic feeling for him. For Tom Robson she had always an unconquerable aversion. It is true that she saw Tom only from his worst side, when he was drinking. In the morning, when Robson was sober, there was something of the gentleman about him. He was always neatly dressed in a blue serge suit, coloured shirt, and in dry weather wore canvas shoes. It was a great pleasure for the young Consul to go his morning round in the shipyard with Mr. Robson. The work went on bravely, and the ship bid fair to be both handsome and well built. Mr. Garman knew Tom's weakness as well as any one, but as long as he attended to his work he was free to use his leisure as he liked. The firm had always worked on the principle that the less the workpeople were interfered with the better. They worked all the better for it, and gave far less trouble generally.
"I think she ought to be ready next spring," said the Consul one day in the beginning of July.