"Do you think, Knutty, that one might be able to injure another person in and through a dream?"
"How should I know?" she said, looking troubled. "I am not given to reflecting on such matters, thank Heaven."
"If one could injure, one could also benefit," he said, without heeding her answer. "There would at least be that comfort—for others."
"And why not for you?" she asked.
"Alas!" he answered, "my dreams were always the other way."
But after he had said that, he returned hastily to his usual reserve, and Fröken Knudsgaard understood him too well to press him for a confidence.
"Besides, it would be waste of tissue," she said to herself. "One would have more success in pressing an alabaster effigy."
But in this way she had had one or two glimpses into his mind, and she was really anxious about his mental state, and not happy about Alan either. She kept her shrewd old eyes open, and she began to see that Alan sometimes avoided being alone with his father. He seemed a little awkward with him, as though some shadow had risen up between them. He too was reserved, and Knutty could not get him to speak of his mother's death.
"I am living with a pair of icebergs," she wrote to her botanist nephew and niece in Copenhagen, Ejnar and Gerda. "Darling icebergs both of them, but icebergs all the same. I find this Arctic expedition of mine, like all Arctic expeditions, fraught with grave difficulties. Write and encourage me, dear ones; and in case I should become a frozen plant, keep an extra warm place for me in the herbarium of your hearts."
But Alan was not reserved about other matters, and he and the old Danish lady became excellent friends together. He said repeatedly to her: