"But all the same...."
"Interesting things won't happen to me every day, you see, Tomas; it would be only stupid."
She looked at him simply. "But," he answered, "people who care for each other always do write."
He was crimson and turned away. She would be sure to laugh. But she did not laugh. In a few minutes he heard her say (he did not turn round), "Yes, yes, then I will," and she devoted herself to gathering the apples.
At the same time Fru Rendalen and the doctor were standing by the parlour window.
She looked by turns at him, and out towards the children in the apple-tree. The doctor had just told her that Lars Tobiassen had become raving mad, and that his son had been frightened, and gone mad also. He had been near it for a long time. "'Kurt inheritance,' the people on the mountain say there have been so many mad Kurts there, men and women." Fru Rendalen had answered that she was aware of that, and that both before Tomas's birth, and for some time afterwards, she had felt frightened. She was safe now though--"although," and she laughed, "Tomas has something unreasonably exaggerated and fantastic about him."
She looked inquiringly at the doctor, who answered, "Yes, his nerves are good for nothing."
Dr. Knut Holmsen was one of those men who are foreordained to be bachelors, though some chance may drift them into matrimony; who never trouble themselves to think or feel with any one else, but always look at things from their own point of view. So now he blurted out this answer as a matter of course. It frightened her, however, terribly.
"Could Tomas become mad?" she asked.
He had not intended to say that; he therefore answered, "Not he, but his children."