"I see I have, dear child; I was right to wait; it was a struggle, but I did right."
"Mother, dear mother, let us go back to the forest at home, to the road through our forest! Let me hear more! It was there it happened, then! Mother, tell me! What came next, sweetest mother! Ah, how lovely you are! There is always something fresh to discover in you."
The mother stroked her hair in silence, soothingly.
"Mother, I know that woodland road on summer nights. Laura walked there with me when she was engaged, and told me how it all happened, and the fishers rode past that time too, just as we came to an opening. We hid ourselves behind a great boulder; and the thrush began to sing, and many other birds, but the thing that affected me most was the scented air."
"Yes, doesn't it? And that is why I have always thought since that the woodland scent hung around Karl. Ah, I must tell you how curiously unconscious he was—what other word can I use? We stood still and looked over the lake. 'Oh, what a longing that gives,' said I. 'Yes, a longing to bathe, doesn't it?' said he."
Magne broke into hearty laughter; the mother smiled. "Now it no longer seems so strange to me. The water was more to him than it is to us—he used to plunge into a bath at the most unexpected times: when he was not to be found in his farms or at his office, that was always where he was. It was his strongest natural craving; he loved the cold embrace of the elements, he said.
"And how he laughed to himself when he saw how I was laughing! We laughed in unison."
"Then, mother, what happened? I can really wait no longer."
"I came home just as other people were getting up. And the next night was like that one, and the next after that, and the next after that again. One night it rained, and we both walked along under the same umbrella, and that was what brought things to a climax."
"To a climax?—how?"