“Why, father, you were only fifty last birthday; you must not talk yet of growing old. How do other men learn, do you think, to take things lightly?”
“By refusing to listen to their own conscience,” said Herr Falck, with sudden vehemence. “By allowing themselves to hold one standard of honor in private life and a very different standard in business transactions. Oh, Sigrid! I would give a great deal to find some other opening for Frithiof. I dread the life for him.”
“Do you think it is really so hard to be strictly honorable in business life? And yet it is a life that must be lived, and is it not better that such a man as Frithiof should take it up—a man with such a high sense of honor?”
“You don’t know what business men have to stand against,” said Herr Falck. “Frithiof is a good, honest fellow, but as yet he has seen nothing of life. And I tell you, child, we often fail in our strongest point.”
He rose from his chair and paced the room; it seemed to Sigrid that a nameless shadow had fallen on their sunny home. She was for the first time in her life afraid, though the fear was vague and undefined.
“But there, little one,” said her father, turning toward her again. “You must not be worried. I get nervous and depressed, that is all. As I told you, I am growing old.”
“Frithiof would like to help you more if you would let him,” said Sigrid, rather wistfully. “He was saying so just now.”
“And so he shall in the autumn. He is a good lad, and if all goes well I hope he will some day be my right hand in the business; but I wish him to have a few months’ holiday first. And there is this one thing, Sigrid, which I can tell you, if you really want to know about my anxieties.”
“Indeed I do, little father,” she said eagerly.
“There are matters which you would not understand even could I speak of them; but you know, of course, that I am agent in Norway for the firm of Morgan Brothers. Well, a rumor has reached me that they intend to break off the connection and to send out the eldest son to set up a branch at Stavanger. It is a mere rumor and reached me quite accidentally. I very much hope it may not be true, but there is no denying that Stavanger would be in most ways better suited for their purpose; in fact, the friend who told me of the rumor said that they felt now that it had been a mistake all along to have the agency here and they had only done it because they knew Bergen and knew me.”