Now it often happens that words haunt us long after they were uttered, especially when they were the last ones heard. So these words haunted Arne when he crept down in the cold from the roof, and were still with him in the evening when he entered the family room. Eli was standing, in the twilight, by a window, gazing out over the ice which lay glittering beneath the moon's beams. Arne went to the other window and looked out as she was doing. Within all was cozy and quiet, without it was cold; a sharp wind swept across the valley, so shaking the trees that the shadows they cast in the moonlight did not lie still, but went groping about in the snow. From the parsonage there glimmered a light, opening out and closing in, assuming many shapes and colors, as light is apt to do when one gazes at it too long. The mountain loomed up beyond, dark and gloomy, with romance in its depths and moonshine on its upper banks of snow. The sky was aglow with stars, and a little flickering northern light appeared in one quarter of the horizon, but did not spread. A short distance from the window, down toward the lake, there were some trees whose shadows kept prowling from one to the other, but the great ash stood alone, writing on the snow.
The night was very still,—only now and then something shrieked and howled with a long, wailing cry.
"What is that?" asked Arne.
"It is the weather-vane," said Eli; and afterwards she continued more softly, as though to herself: "It must have been let loose."
But Arne had been feeling like one who wanted to speak and could not. Now he said:—
"Do you remember the story about the thrushes that sang?"
"Yes."
"Why, to be sure, it was you who told that one! It was a pretty story."
She said, in so gentle a voice that it seemed as though it were the first time he heard it,—
"I often think there is something that sings when it is quite still."