"How old are you?" asked Mary.
"Over thirty."
They shouted with laughter.
This they should not have done. This he must punish. Before Alice divined his intention, he seized her round the waist, turned, and was off with her in the most frantic gallop up the road, raising clouds of dust. Stout Alice struggled with all her might and screamed. But this was of no avail; it only delighted him. Her hat and her shawl fell off. Mary ran and picked them up, helpless with laughter; for these ungainly and perfectly useless attempts at resistance were irresistibly comic. At last Frans turned, and they came back again at the same wild pace and stopped where Mary stood—Alice's face distorted, perspiring, and red. Her breathless rage, incapable of utterance, made Mary explode. Frans sang: Hop sa-sa! hop-sa-sa! in front of the angry lady, until she could speak and abuse him. Then he laughed.
"And you—?" said Mary, now turning to Frans. "Has it not tired you at all?"
"Not much. I'm quite prepared to take the same trip with you."
Mary was horrified. She had just given Alice her hat, and was standing holding the shawl and her own hat, which she had taken off. With a cry she threw both from her and set off in the homeward direction, towards the waiting carriage.
Not for an instant had Frans Röy thought of doing what he threatened. He had spoken in jest. But when he saw her run, and with a speed for which he would have given neither her nor any other woman credit, his soldier's blood took it as a challenge. Alice saw this and said hurriedly: "Don't do it." The words flung themselves in his way so insistently that he stood doubtful. But Mary yonder on the road in the white dress with the red hair above it, running with a step so swift and light that the very rhythm of it allured him, nay, bereft him of his senses ... he was off before he knew what he was about, just as Alice called for the second time, in an agonised tone: "Don't do it!"
The strip of light above the dust of the road in front of him shone into his eyes and his imagination like the sun. It blinded him. He ran without consciousness of what he was doing. He ran as if: "Catch me! Catch me!" were being shouted in front the whole time. He ran as if the winning of life's highest prize depended on his reaching Mary.
She had a long start of him. Precisely this incited to the uttermost exertion of all his powers. A race for happiness with one who desired to be beaten! Blood at the boiling point surged in his ears; desire burned in it. The longings of all these days and nights were tumultuously urging him on to victory. Speak they would at last. No, speech would be uncalled for; he would have her in his arms.