"Why not?" replied Elsie, briskly. "I have told him so more than once. Had Mat Jute not fallen into misfortune, along with his master, and become such a ferocious strand-fighter, I should have had no fear of taking him for a husband. But the Lord preserve me from him now!"
"Aha!" laughed the kitchen-maid: "he kills folk, they say, for the smallest ill word said against his master. He must be a perfect fiend."
"Say not so," cried Elsie. "Fierce he is, it is true, but he is still an honest fellow. He is true to his master--more's the pity!--and I cannot bear anybody to speak ill of him."
"Old love doesn't die," remarked one of the men-servants; "and if Mat Jute knew that thou hast now another sweetheart, little Elsie, he would yet come and bite thy head off."
"As for that," returned Elsie, "I am truer to him than many Funen lads are to their lasses; and, besides, I have only one sweetheart at a time."
"If thou wouldst see the show, Elsie, haste thee, or it will be gone," cried the brewer's maid. "It went up to the churchyard; and, if I saw truly in my fright, there was a light in the choir."
"Let us call the master!" exclaimed the kitchen-maid: "it is really awful. They may be church-robbers; and if they be ghosts, the father can read them away."
This was agreed to, and one of the maids went to awake her master.
"It is, more likely, the outlawed marsk, who wants to add to his treasury at Eskebjerg," observed one of the men-servants: "he has heaps of gold and jewels there, it is said."
"How long you think about it, Elsie," cried the kitchen-maid--"thou who hast been in a fortress. When thou wert at Flynderborg, thou wert afraid of neither soldiers nor rievers--thou wert then as bold as thy jomfru."