Sigrid bit her lip hard to keep back the retort that she longed to make, and they walked in silence toward the little cluster of wooden buildings on the hill-side, the lowest of which contained the bedrooms, while further up the hill the kitchen and dining-room stood on one side of the open courtyard, and on the other the prettily arranged public sitting-room. In warm weather Hjerkin is a little paradise, but on this windy day, under a leaden sky, it seemed the most depressing place on earth.
“I shall go in and write to Frithiof,” said Sigrid, at length. And escaping gladly from Fru Grönvold, she ran up to her room.
“Here we are at Hjerkin,” she wrote, “for a month, and it is more desolate than I can describe to you, uncle and Oscar out shooting all day long, and scarcely a soul to speak to, for most of the English have been driven away by the bad weather, and two girls from Stockholm who were here for their health are leaving this afternoon, unable to bear the dullness any longer. If something doesn’t happen soon I think I shall grow desperate. But surely something will happen. We can’t be meant to go on in this wretched way, apart from each other. I am disappointed that you think there is no chance of any opening for me in London. If it were not for Swanhild I think I should try for work—any sort of work except teaching—at Christiania. But I can’t bear to leave her, and uncle would object to my trying for anything of the sort in Bergen. I can’t help thinking of the old times when we were children, and of the summer holidays then. Don’t you remember when we had the island all to ourselves, and used to rush down the fir-hill, and frighten poor old Gro?”
She stopped writing because the thought of those past days had blinded her with tears, and because the longing for her father’s presence had overwhelmed her; they had been so much to each other that there was not an hour in the day when she did not miss him. The dreary wind howling and whistling round the little wooden house seemed to harmonize only too well with her sadness, and when the unwelcome supper-bell began to ring she wrapped her shawl about her, and climbed the steep path to the dining-room, slowly and reluctantly, with a look on her pale face which it was sad to see in one so young.
Swanhild came dancing to meet her.
“Major Brown has got us such beautiful trout for supper, Sigrid, and uncle says I may go out fishing, too, some day. And you’ll come with us, wont you?”
“You had better take Karen,” said Sigrid listlessly. “You know I never did care much for fishing. You shall catch them and I will eat them,” she added, with a dreary little smile. And throughout supper she hardly spoke, and at the first opportunity slipped away quietly, only, however, to be pursued by Swanhild.
“What is the matter?” said the child, slipping her arm round her sister’s waist. “Are you not coming to the sitting-room?”
“No,” said Sigrid, “I am tired, and it is so cold in there. I am going into the kitchen to buy some stamps. Frithiof’s letter ought to go to-morrow.”