The two windows of the house looked out towards the garden, and there was an extensive view from them, but the door was in the end wall to the left, to which a porch had been added, with a few steps leading up to it. All was quiet here, inside and out, but the jubilant voices of the little ones below, and the screams of the angry child from the other side, further away, met in the air.
The garden, along which they passed, was the largest they had seen on the mountains, though certainly neither it, nor the house, were what one would call well kept. But there was comfort, or whatever one might call it: Tomasine hesitated for the right word. She now saw a child with dark hair and bright, wondering eyes, who got up from the steps, letting something fall from her lap, as she ran quickly into the house-place. Immediately afterwards there appeared a tall elderly woman, with dark untidy hair, and a handsome and intelligent, though rather dirty face. The woman at once recognised Tomasine, who now came up the steps and entered the porch.
"Have you come to see us, Frue?" she asked, smiling.
Tomasine was again busy with her eternal spectacles, and when she put them on again, the woman had tidied up the place as well as she could, with the little girl clinging with both hands to her skirt, so that, however the woman turned, the child was hidden from the strange lady. Andreas Berg remained outside. Marit Stöen apologised for her untidy room, with a pleasant voice and simple skill. It was getting on to dinner-time, she said, and everything certainly ought to be very different. But there had been a dance there the evening before. They like to keep it up a long time, you see. She would still less like to ask the lady to come into the parlour, for it was even worse, she said, laughing. It was by no means a small sum that she made by letting the room, and by the coffee she sold. Her room was the largest on that side; for the mountain was divided in two as it were. "The people here will have nothing to do with those on the other side." And she laughed again.
Tomasine Rendalen had taken a seat, but when she began to look round the room, she found that the spectacles must come off again. She was warmer than she had supposed. As she took them off, she asked after the child's mother. The woman replied that Petrea was married.
"Married!"
"Yes, to a mate of the name of Aslaksen. He was a smart, clever fellow, and he would have her. They did not live here any longer," she said, and proceeded to explain their circumstances in detail. "Aslaksen would soon get a ship."
The child peeped now and again from behind her grandmother's skirts, and each time Tomasine glanced towards her. She had a shock of dark hair like her grandmother's, and in other respects was a blending of John Kurt and the woman standing before her--a blending which, she could not deny it, gave her a feeling of aversion. And yet the little thing was pretty. She had undoubtedly Kurt's wild eyes, but there was laughter in them as well as wildness.
"So the child remains with you?" said Tomasine, pointing with her parasol to where she was hiding.
"The child, yes, she's all right," answered the grandmother, while she patted her grandchild's head. "John Kurt, he paid for Petrea, as soon as ever she had her misfortune. And had a christening, so grand as you would hardly believe, and along a' that, he gives her a savings-bank book with a hundred specie-daler in it, and his father gave her another on top of it with just as much in it again." And Marit Stöen began to cry from sheer gratitude, because John Kurt had given two hundred daler to his own child.