This "to-day" told Magnhild that Rönnaug had long been wanting to talk with her. Had the window Magnhild now stood beside been a little larger, she would certainly have jumped out of it.
But before Rönnaug managed to begin in earnest, something happened. Noise and laughter were heard in the street, and ringing through them an infuriated man's voice. "And you will prevent me from taking the sacrament, you hypocritical villain?" After this a dead silence, and then peals of laughter. Most likely the man had been seized and carried off; the shouting and laughing of boys and old women resounded through the street, and gradually sounded farther and farther away.
Neither of the two women in the chamber had stirred from her place. They had both peered out through the door toward the sitting-room window, but they had also both turned away again, Magnhild toward the garden. But Rönnaug had been reminded by this interruption of Machine Martha, who in her day had been the terror and sport of the coast town. Scarcely, therefore, had the noise died away, before she asked,—
"Do you remember Machine Martha? Do you remember something that I told you about your husband and her? I have been making inquiries concerning it and I now know more than I did before. Let me tell you it is unworthy of you to live under the same roof with such a man as Skarlie."
Very pale, Magnhild turned proudly round with:—
"That is no business of mine!"
"That is no business of yours? Why you live in his house, eat his food, wear his clothes, and bear his name,—and his conduct is no business of yours?"
But Magnhild swept past her and went into the sitting-room without vouchsafing a reply. She took her stand by one of the windows opening on the street.
"Aye, if you do not feel this to be a disgrace, Magnhild, you have sunk lower than I thought."
Magnhild had just leaned her head, against the window frame. She now drew it up sufficiently to look at Rönnaug and smile, then she bowed forward again. But this smile had sent the blood coursing up to Rönnaug's cheeks, for she had felt their joint youth compared in it.