In Ole's fancy Josephine was to be always with them, though Edward did not actually say as much. But it was clear that she was to be with them. And Ole thought this showed so much tact on Edward's part and was very grateful to him; indeed it quite decided him. Josephine was to be the clergyman's wife and manage everything in the house.
At last he agreed to all; it was decided that one was to be a clergyman and the other a doctor, and they were to live together. The last thing they talked about was their fishing expeditions.
They heard sounds of tramping and talking; it was the men coming home from the herring-fishing. But they were very tired and soon fell asleep.
YOUTH
I.
FIRST COUPLE FORWARD
There was a party of young people collected together at a country house about five kilometres outside the town. The garden they were sitting in down by the cove was brightly coloured by their light summer clothes, especially those of the girls:
"Yellow, black, brown, white,
Green, violet, blue,"
some self-coloured, others variegated, checks and stripes; felt hats, straw hats, tulle hats, caps, bare heads, parasols. A sound of singing rose harmoniously up out of this medley of colour; men's and women's voices in chorus floating in long undulating waves of sound. There was no conductor; a dark young girl in a brown checked dress lay in the midst of the group, leaning on one elbow, and led the singing with a soprano voice stronger and clearer than the others; and they followed her lead. They were in good practice. In the cove below them lay a freshly painted smack, with half rigged up new sails; the water calm as a mirror.
The singing and the smack seemed brightly to enter into league with each other down in that black-looking cove, overshadowed and shut in by the bleak mountains with still higher ones in the distance. The little cove was like a mountain lake, once caused by a flood but since forgotten. The mountains--oh, so heavy and stunted in outline as in colour, rugged and leaden-looking, the more distant ones blue-black, with dirty snow on their peaks, monsters all of them.